When Dhyan Chand and India’s Olympians Refused to Salute Hitler

 The Indian contingent was one of only two teams to not raise their arm as they marched past the Nazi dictator in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a protest made sweeter by the hockey team beating Germany to win the gold medal.

The Berlin Olympics were declared open on August 1, 1936. M.N. Masood, a member of the team, left a minute-by-minute description of the opening ceremony that provides fascinating information. It was nothing less than a grand spectacle of Hitler’s ‘thousand-year Reich’. The Wehrmacht was fully mobilised in setting up the support infrastructure and the competitors were transported to the venue in army trucks. The Indians, with Dhyan Chand carrying the flag, were by far the most colourfully dressed of the contingents present. As Masood noted,

‘With our golden “kullahs” and light blue turbans, our contingent appeared as members of a marriage procession of some rich Hindu gentleman, rather than competitors in the Olympic Games.’

But this was no ordinary ‘marriage procession’ – the members of the Indian team were about to make a huge political statement by becoming one of the only two contingents who refused to salute Adolf Hitler.

The Olympic Stadium in Berlin, 1936. Photo: Frankl, A./Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0

The opening ceremony of the Berlin Olympics was one of the great set-pieces of the Nazi era. As the giant zeppelin, the Hindenberg, circled majestically over the stadium, Hitler and his minister of interior arrived amid great fanfare to observe a military guard of honour.

M.N. Masood noted the fervour that the Führer generated:

‘When the Führer neared the Stadium, a multitude of young boys who were watching the proceedings from outside, saw their idol approaching towards them. With one great cry, they shouted ‘Heil, Hitler!’ and broke the silence of the Maifield.’

In four years, that war cry would reverberate around the world but the panzer blitzkriegs and the horrors of the holocaust were still in the future. At the time, at least some Indians were impressed by this disciplined spectacle of the resurgent Third Reich.

As ‘the hundred thousand Germans in the Stadium stood to their feet and sang with one voice’ the two German national hymns – ‘Deutschland’ and ‘Horst Wessel-Lied’ – Masood writes that it ‘made a strange impression’ upon the Indian contingent and ‘not an eye was left dry’:

‘India rose before our imagination … somehow the spring of our national feelings was touched, and the unity and solidarity of the people in the Stadium made us look with shame and regret at our poverty, destitution and discord.’

But nationalist aspirations were not the same as sympathising with the Nazi cause. What Masood does not mention in his elaborate description is the serious controversy the Indians created at the opening ceremony by not saluting Hitler during the march past. The Indians were the only contingent apart from the Americans to not perform the raised-arm salute as a mark of respect for the German chancellor.

British-loyalist newspapers like The Statesman were more focused on the defiant US contingent, making only a brief mention of what the Indians did. This was partly because of the dark cloud that hung over the participation of the US and the threat of a boycott by some of their athletes, with Jewish athletes Milton Green and Norman Canners staying true to their word. The high-profile American contingent, uncertain as to whether its participation might be interpreted as support for the Nazi regime and its anti-Semitic policies, had barely made it to Berlin after a narrowly won vote orchestrated by sports administrator and future IOC President Avery Brundage. But their contingent refused to dip its flag or ‘doff its headgear’ when passing the podium, eliciting ‘a certain amount of whistling from a section of the crowd’. The Berlin Games are remembered mostly for the exploits of the African-American athlete Jesse Owens, whose triumph disproved Nazi theories of Aryan dominance. For most journalists, the Americans were the story of the Games.

Spectators giving the Nazi salute during one of the medal ceremonies. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0

Yet, the Indian decision not to salute Hitler was a grand gesture of defiance, totally in sync with the tenets of the dominant stream of Indian nationalism and the Congress Party. This was perhaps why loyalist newspapers in India chose not to play it up. The Calcutta Statesman chose to place its coverage of the Indian defiance on its political pages as opposed to the sports pages where all Olympic news was usually placed.

It is important to note that G.D. Sondhi, one of the officials accompanying the Indian contingent, was deeply influenced by Nehruvian ideas. In the late 1940s, inspired by Nehru’s internationalist ideals and the dream of pan-Asian unity, he single-handedly evolved and created the framework of the Asian Games. At a time when Britain was courting Hitler with its policy of appeasement – just two years after which the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, was to triumphantly declare ‘peace for our times’ after the Munich conference – the Indian decision not to salute the Führer, it seems, stemmed ideologically from the anti-Nazi position taken by the Congress under Gandhi and Nehru. From the 1920s, the Congress had repeatedly opposed Britain in the event of a European war and regarded fascism and Nazism as forms of Western imperialism.

Dhyan Chand scoring a goal in the 1936 Olympic hockey final. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

In 1936, the same year as the Indians were marching in Berlin, Nehru told the Lucknow session of the Congress that ‘Capitalism in its difficulties took to Fascism’ and ‘fascism and imperialism … stood out as the two faces of the now decaying capitalism’. It was as impossible for India to support Britain’s new opponents as it was to support Britain. From 1938 onwards, Gandhi began opposing Hitler in the pages of Harijan, at one point even sending him a letter to desist from violence. In 1939, the Congress resolved to ‘keep aloof from both imperialism and fascism’ in its session in Tripuri.

There is no evidence to show any direct linkage between the Congress and the athletes’ decision to not salute Hitler in Berlin. But the fact remains that it was a political act, breath-taking in its audacity and in direct opposition to most other contingents at the Games, including the British. Managers like Sondhi were in all likelihood influenced by nationalist sentiment as articulated by the Congress leadership. The ‘marriage procession’ carried an underlying political message…

Against all expectations of a resurgent German team, Dhyan Chand and his team crushed Germany 8–1 to win their third consecutive Olympic gold. Forced to swallow their dire predictions, the sportswriters once again wrote flowery paeans and the title defence was narrated in great detail. Triumphant subheadings in The Statesman summed up the mood of the match report: ‘India’s Triumph’, ‘Science Scores Over Force’, and ‘Dhyan Chand in Form’.

Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta

Dreams of a Billion: India and the Olympic Games 

Harper Collins

This report left little doubt about India’s overwhelming supremacy: ‘In the second half science triumphed over force and the skill of Indian forwards, assisted by a hardworking trio of halves brought goal after goal. The vast crowd rose as one man as the Indians made raid after raid, completely outwitting the home defence with their speed and stickwork and their uncanny accuracy of shooting.

Goal after goal was scored to the bewilderment of the German side and though they played with their greatest pluck and gameness and managed to score once, they were a well-beaten team.’ It was in this game that Dhyan Chand truly came into his own in the Berlin Olympics.

Dhyan Chand had discarded his stockings and spiked shoes and wore rubber sole shoes, which increased his speed a great deal. That he was at his best is borne out by the handsome scoreline of 8–1. Dhyan Chand himself scored six goals. The German papers, which until then had been predicting a German gold, were full of praise for the Indians after the final. A correspondent for the Morning Post argued that Berlin would remember the Indian hockey team for long. ‘These players, it is said, glided over turf as if it is a skating rink and their flickering sticks had the Japanese, normally so agile, mesmerised.’ The reporter went on to conclude, ‘Nature seems to have endowed Indians with a special aptitude for hockey’. The legend of Indian hockey and the Games’ special affinity with what was still seen as the ‘Orient’ was embellished further.

It is a tenet of Indian sporting folklore that Hitler personally met Dhyan Chand and offered him an officer’s commission in the Wehrmacht if he would play for Germany. This story is almost certainly apocryphal because none of the contemporary sources mention this incident and neither does Dhyan Chand in his autobiography…

The 1936 Olympic campaign finally put to rest any doubts regarding India’s hockey supremacy. India had won all its matches in style, scoring thirty-eight goals in the process and conceding only one. Dhyan Chand, once discriminated against for his inferior social status, had consolidated his position as the darling of the Western world. A statue of his was erected in Vienna. Another statue erected later in Delhi’s Dhyan Chand National Stadium remains the only sculpture dedicated to a hockey player in independent India.

His six goals against the Germans in the final were no less an achievement than Jesse Owen’s four gold medals in track and field. As Gulu Ezekiel wrote, ‘While on the track Jesse Owens exploded the many myths of Aryan superiority, which the Nazi forces had carefully propounded, on the hockey field Dhyan Chand created magic.’ It was not without reason that the government of India issued a postage stamp in his honour and conferred on him one of India’s highest civilian distinctions, the Padma Bhushan, in 1956.

This is an extract from Boria Majumdar and Nalin Mehta’s book Dreams of a Billion: India and the Olympic Games (Harper Collins, 2020).

(Source: The Wire)

A modernist jigsaw in 110 pieces

Wolfgang Koeppen’s novel Pigeons on the Grass, first published in 1951 as Tauben im Gras, is among the earliest, grandest, and most poetically satisfying reckonings in fiction with the postwar state of the world. What have we done to ourselves? What may we hope for? 

Is life from now on going to be different? Is it even going to be possible? These are the unasked and unanswerable questions that hover around this great novel composed in bite-size chunks, a cross section of a damaged society presented—natch!—in cutup. I once described it as a “Modernist jigsaw in 110 pieces,” but it is as compulsively readable as Dickens or Elmore Leonard. The form catches the eye, but the content is no slouch either. It must be one of the shortest of the universal books, the ones of which you think, If it isn’t in here, it doesn’t exist.

The setting is Munich, a place to which Koeppen had first come toward the end of the war. It is where, in his own words, he “lay low and made himself small,” where he met Marion Ulrich, his much younger wife (they were married in 1948), and where he lived until his death in 1996, at the age of almost ninety. More to the point, it is “the little town out of which death sprawled over the classroom map,” as Joseph Brodsky calls it, the epicenter of the developments that an Austrian corporal and failed watercolorist had initially set in train with the Munich Putsch of 1923, developments that, it is calmly suggested near the end of the novel, might be on the point of getting going again. Amid the destruction and the rebuilding, the novel, set in that same 1948, is looking for early signs of a pattern. 

AERIAL VIEW OF THE MUNICH RESIDENZ AFTER BOMBINGS, 1945. PUBLIC DOMAIN, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

Is the cycle of violence, exhaustion, and resentment about to get going again, as happened after World War I (as Koeppen, born in 1906, knew very well from personal experience); or is there some higher meaning in it, as Mr. Edwin the visiting poet-intellectual would have us believe; or is there perhaps no meaning at all, is it all random patternlessness, “pigeons on the grass,” as Gertrude Stein wrote, or, as she is ignorantly—and rather well—paraphrased by Miss Burnett, the visiting Massachusetts schoolmistress: “the birds are here by chance, we are here by chance, and maybe the Nazis were here by chance, Hitler was a chance, his politics were a dreadful and stupid chance, maybe the world is a dreadful and stupid chance of God’s, no one knows why we are here, the birds will fly off and we will walk on”?

Into this place and this time, caught as we have been almost entirely since—with the small exception of the nineties, when the world briefly promised to be “unipolar” and history to have “ended” (with whatever different hellish consequences that might have had)—between hope and despair, divided in two or more armed camps, enduring or soliciting occupation of one kind or another, engaged in small-scale conflicts or preparing for the Big One, blithely or grimly minding our own business or sleepless with fear and disgust, Koeppen introduces his dramatis personae of Germans and Americans, of soldiers and civilians, white people and Black people, women and men, young and old, celebrities and nonentities, greater and lesser villains. (Who is “good” here? Maybe Hillegonda, maybe Washington, maybe Philipp? But nothing is made of it—it’s not an interesting category. We are crooked timbers. We crash singly, we crash together, and we crash en masse.) Elsewhere, Koeppen writes of the same period and the same atmosphere:

In those days, war and peace hung in the balance, only we didn’t know. We didn’t hear about the cataclysm that threatened us until much later, in newspapers that hadn’t yet been printed. Whoever could, ate well. We sipped our coffee and our brandy; we worked hard to earn money, and if the circumstances were favorable, we slept with one another.

Recollecting London at much the same time and in much the same condition, the painter Frank Auerbach has remarked: “There may be some feeling of that turmoil and freedom in those pictures that there was in London after the war. There was a curious feeling of liberty about because everybody who was living there had escaped death in some way. It was sexy in a way, this semi-destroyed London. There was a scavenging feeling of living in a ruined town.” 

Metaphorically, or in microcosm—and, coincidentally or not, there is just such a scene in Pigeons on the Grass—we are standing at a set of lights—probably, come to think of it, a rather recent development for 1948—waiting for it to be “our turn.” “Fates, conspire,” says John Berryman.

After that, it is just a matter of threading and linking incident, cueing the pieces, plotting the entanglements, devising the superconducting phrases or tropes that will end a passage and—via a misunderstanding, it has been pointed out, in some different sense, almost homonymically—begin the next one. People live their lives, confront or ignore their difficulties, head off toward—another phrase from Koeppen’s later novel Death in Rome—“the next fraudulent little transaction.” (The condition of civilization is too rudimentary for honesty to be a policy at all.) Some of these have more carry, more scale, more applicability, some less; but to the characters, and to the book, they are all there is, they all come alike, and they are all the same size. 

There is not a central plot and flanking subplots, a principal figure and subsidiaries; everything is in equal measure major, everyone gets their moment in the book’s light and dark, its night and day. In their sum, they are the totality of existence. Everything teeters and winks, dangling its binary yes/no. It is in the balance. It will come about, or it won’t. Fates, conspire: Frau Behrend wanting her coffee and her groceries; Ezra the stray dog; Alexander the “great actor” a little peace; Washington a life somewhere with Carla and their baby carried to term; Hillegonda salvation; Emilia a sale; Susanne a night to remember, or at least not to forget; the astonishing narcopathic Schnakenbach his magic formula; Josef the price of a drink; Mr. Edwin (who seems maybe three parts T. S. Eliot and one part Auden or Spender) the success of his talk and a piece of rough trade afterward. And so on, and so on.

The book is a panopticon (much like Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood from 1953), and it tells the stories of people in all their myriad circumstances wanting love, or maybe to be comforted. Koeppen is effortlessly all-seeing, all-knowing. Nothing human is alien, et cetera. Everyone is an everyman (or everywoman). Love and death stand at the exits. The future shyly intimates, the past unpredictably looms. Back in the day, Amerika Haus is a Fascist building, the American visitors are beguiled by the Nazis’ favorite Badenweiler March, the Hofbräuhaus takes all comers, Odysseus Cotton and Susanne (“since she was Circe and the Sirens and maybe also Nausicaa”) fall into their timeless, mythic roles. The book is full of repurposed locations, make-do-and-mend, second acts, moving parts, old situations, old signals.

*

A great mystery to me, and maybe what draws me to Koeppen more than anything else, is how he can write some sentences that are verbless stubs, and others that go on for dozens or scores of lines, and it all sounds like him, and it all is him. It is not style because style changes, and he comes in different styles—but it is perhaps distance or tone, compounded from coldness, information, certitude, indifference, a certain propensity to label, to repeat, to talk up or slang down. 

Susanne, who in this book successively appears in a lesbian floor show, steals some perfume, possibly kills Josef, picks up, robs, and rescues Odysseus, is likened to a Homeric figure; the boy Ezra sees everything from the vantage point of his own personal fighter bomber; Philipp, shy and ineffectual as he is, is indestructible; Emilia’s groping pawnbroker Unverlacht is styled as a frog. The prose is sumptuous and cadenced, built to be read aloud; the sentences begin briskly, purposefully, then they are distractible, suddenly ferocious, briefly learned, encounter a mantra, loop and repeat, work themselves free. Then a run of nothing but curt blurts. It is as though Koeppen unites in himself the virtues of wildness and sleekness. These are not books the reader makes; they are written with uncommon decisiveness.

*

Koeppen was himself far too impulsive and unorthodox a character to have done such a thing on purpose, or to have planned it thus far in advance, but Pigeons on the Grass turned out to have been the first part of a novel trilogy. In 1953, he published a second part called The Hothouse, in 1954, the third called Death in Rome. All three books are set at the time they were written—they are all “live.” 

Together, they are known as the “postwar trilogy.” They were the last novels he wrote in his life. He lived another forty years and wrote no others. Now, you may say, nothing easier than to have written three novels and then call them a trilogy, or five and a quincunx, or ten and a decalogue. “What’s that when it’s at home?” my skeptical friend Paul Muldoon might quip; I would probably once have been dubious, too. I don’t like poems in parts, or paintings in parts either. But having long been inside all three books myself, I have to say I am positively in awe of their parallelisms and congruencies.

First, there are no major overlaps among the books: no shared characters, no internal references, nothing like that. The first is set in Munich, the second in Bonn, the small town on the Rhine that had recently pipped Frankfurt to become the capital of the Western half of the divided Germany, the third in the Eternal City, Rome. Pigeons on the Grass is a polynarrative, numerous turning cogs and wheels, like a piece of clockwork; The Hothouse is a monodrama, the story of a Social Democrat member of the Reichstag on the day of a big rearmament debate; Death in Rome brings the four members of a German family, two brothers-in-law and their respective sons (representatives of four great German trades: murder, bureaucracy, theology, and music), to an unintended reunion. 

The first book is impersonal (we guess Philipp is our point of identification, but we’re not told, and he certainly has no privileges); the second is all personal, with Keetenheuve imagining his decisions and actions reflected in headlines, in italics; in the third, the artist figure, Siegfried Pfaffrath, is given a monopoly on the first person, but only in his sections. So it’s not the setting or the conception or the machinery of the books that are shared. What is it? First, it’s that in each book a public event is trailed, and built up to, and takes place: in Pigeons on the Grass, it’s Mr. Edwin’s talk; in The Hothouse, Keetenheuve’s speech in the debate; in Death in Rome, it’s the concert of new serial music composed by Siegfried. Each book observes the unities of time and place; the first two happen within twenty-four hours, Death in Rome in the space of two days and a night.

But what I am talking about is more inward than that. Each novel seems to be rendered from the postwar atmosphere; it is as though impalpable things—as I say, atmosphere—have concretized themselves or been precipitated against cold glass. (Hence, in part, I think, the title The Hothouse.) Either that, or three different mosaics have been assembled—bricolaged—from the same rubble. The same ingredients make three dishes; the same breakage makes three different books. Everything is real, but we are having three go-arounds on a ghost train as well, which means they are metaphysical, and devices. A bewildering number of the same things, properties, Maguffins, recur in all three: Cars, big luxury cars. Showers—for Alexander, for Frost-Forestier, for Judejahn. 

Newspaper criers and newspapers. Newspapers, magazines, and radio. Dictaphones or recorders for Philipp, for Frost-Forestier, for Siegfried. Onions. Beer. The books kill off and pair off, bring unexpected deaths and asymmetrical loves. Fast food: Weisswürste in one—“white veal sausages. Klett the hairdresser peeled the skin off the whitish filling with his fingers and popped it in his mouth. 

Candy-I-call-my-sugar-candy. Klett smacked his lips and grunted contentedly”—meatballs in another—“there was Helen, envied, reviled, eating her meatballs and mashed potatoes with the head of the working group on agricultural land degradation”—hamburgers in the third—“The waiter brought food. The men must have ordered it. Fried onions sizzled on large meat patties. They ate. They stuffed themselves. The men liked the onions. Judejahn liked the onions.”

Cheese. Wine. Buildings. Tunnels and bridges. Cats and dogs. A room above the city, for sex. Ruins. Male prostitutes. Gangs of children. Tribades. The cinema. The German forest. History. 

Mythology. Literary references, ringing the horizon of all the books: Gertrude Stein (the title of Pigeons in the Grass), Kafka (the ending of The Hothouse from The Judgment), Thomas Mann (title and ending of Death in Rome from Death in Venice). Fish. “How much Edwin would have liked otherwise to discuss the Physiologie-du-gout with the chef and watch the pretty kitchen boys shucking gentle gold-gleaming fish.”—“The matjes was a longtime inmate of salt barrels.”— “They brought him a plate of sea creatures fried in oil and batter. 

He gulped them down; they tasted like fried earthworms to him, and he felt nauseated. He felt his heavy body turning into worms, he felt his guts squirming with putrescence, and in order to fight off his disintegration, and in spite of his nausea, he polished off everything on the plate.” These things—and I have no doubt there are dozens of others—are deliberately deployed. They have a deteriorating tendency that suggests forward planning—I don’t know how Koeppen did it. 

He had never been to Rome before a chance invitation in 1954; his Bonn book he wrote in Stuttgart. They don’t deplete or detract from the realism of the books, they are merely a further formal challenge for the author, and a complicating, delaying, enriching thing for the reader. After all, everything that resists limits extends the life of a book, toward infinity, where it belongs.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Earth-skimming meteoroid dipped 56 miles into the atmosphere over the Netherlands and Germany before returning to space

 A meteoroid was captured skimming Earth's atmosphere for a few seconds above Germany and the Netherlands before returning on its journey through space.

Astronomers spotted the bright cosmic object streaking across the night sky on September 22, as is dipped 56 miles in altitude - lower than any satellites orbiting Earth.

The video was shot at 11:53pm ET and shows the meteoroid covering a path of more than 499 miles as it sunk into our atmosphere for 19 seconds.

More than 100 people reported seeing the meteoroid and shared images they snapped of the event

Researchers from Western University traced it to a Jupiter-family orbit, but was unable to identify matches of potential parent bodies.

The September 22 event, although lasting just 19 seconds, left those on the ground in awe as they witnessed the spaced rock streak through the night sky.

The video was taken by the Global Meteor Network (GMN), which is a team of amateur astronomers who have cameras all over the world to capture such occasions.

Pictured is a graph showing the more than 466 mile path the meteoroid took as it skimmed Earth's atmosphere

The September 22 event, although lasting just 19 seconds, left those on the ground in awe as they witnessed the spaced rock streak through the night sky.

The video was taken by the Global Meteor Network (GMN), which is a team of amateur astronomers who have cameras all over the world to capture such occasions.

Tens of thousands of meteorites have been found on Earth, yet, of these only about 40 can be traced back to a parent asteroid or asteroidal source.

A study conducted by Harvard speculates that an Earth skimming asteroid may have taken life to Venus, which is based on the 2017 meteor that was spotted over Australia.

The team believes this meteor could have collected up some 10,000 microbial colonies from our world and carried it to another.

Researchers from Western University traced it to a Jupiter-family orbit, but was unable to identify matches of potential parent bodies

The study notes that over the last 3.7 billion years, at least 600,000 space rocks that dipped into Earth's atmosphere have a collided with Venus.

'Although the abundance of terrestrial life in the upper atmosphere is unknown, these planet-grazing shepherds could have potentially been capable of transferring microbial life between the atmospheres of Earth and Venus,' the Harvard study reads.

'As a result, the origin of possible Venusian life may be fundamentally indistinguishable from that of terrestrial life.'

Previous research determined that life is found up to an altitude of 43 miles from the surface.

Earth-grazing asteroids can dip 52 miles without experiencing significant heating – another lower would kill any life it gathered from our planet.

Earth grazing meteoroids occur sporadically – the last one to be captured was spotted over Australia in 2017 (pictured). This event lasted for one and a half minutes and the space rock soared through Earth's atmosphere at more than 35,000 mile per hour before returning to space

'Further work is needed to investigate the existence and abundance of microbial life in the upper atmosphere,' reads the study.

The team also notes that if a meteor coming from Earth enters the atmosphere of another planet, hitchhiking microbes could be released in clouds before the rock disintegrates in the atmosphere.

'A future probe that could sample the habitable cloud deck of Venus will potentially enable the direct discovery of microbial life outside of Earth, the team wrote.'

'Specifically, the capability to either directly analyze microbes in situ or to return an atmospheric sample to Earth will be critical in the design of a successful mission. Finding exactly the same genomic material and helicity on Venus and Earth would constitute a smoking gun for panspermia.'

(Source: Daily Mail)

Adolf Hitler: How the Nazi dictator met his death 75 years ago and brought the Second World War to a close

Feared German leader’s final days spent in darkness of the Fuhrerbunker as a ‘palsied, enfeebled, prematurely aged old man in a soup-stained uniform’ reduced to shrieking ‘nonsensical orders to half-exterminated armies’

Adolf Hitler took his own life on 30 April 1945, dying in ignominy in an underground shelter at the Reich Chancellery two days after his fascist ally Benito Mussolini had been assassinated by partisans in the small northern Italian village of Giulino di Mezzegra.

With the Western Allies days away from retaking Europe, Poland in the hands of the advancing Red Army and Berlin under relentless siege, the Fuhrer was forced to concede his vision of founding a new empire to last a thousand years lay in tatters, his hope of global conquest for the greater glory of the Teutonic “master race” doomed to end in failure.

He shot himself through the right temple with a 7.65mm Walther PP pistol, biting down on a cyanide capsule as he did so to ensure there would be no question of his survival.

His wife, Eva Braun – whom he had married a day earlier in their dank subterranean rooms – followed suit, ensuring that neither would have to face capture by the Russians or answer for the unprecedented atrocities carried out by the Third Reich under his direction.

Hitler, Braun, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his wife Magda and their six children, plus members of the party’s trusted inner circle and staff had taken up residence in the Fuhrerbunker on 16 January as the once-mighty German army found itself pushed to the verge of collapse after six years of devastating conflict.

Each subsequent day had brought more news of steady British and American progress into Nazi-occupied territory from the west and the unstoppable march of Soviet troops to the east.

By 16 April, the Russians had arrived to commence the Battle of Berlin, bringing 2.5 million men and 6,525 tanks to the doorstep of the world’s third-largest city on three fronts, commanded in turn by marshals Georgy Zhukov, Ivan Konev and Konstantin Rokossovky. The exhausted Nazis were outnumbered and outgunned five-to-one with little serious hope of defending the capital, reliant on flimsy barricades thrown up in desperation to fend off invasion.

“It would be much better to have me shot,” remarked General Helmuch Weidling when he was tasked with mounting a last stand to save Berlin.

On 20 April, Adolf Hitler made his final appearance above ground as he emerged from the sanctuary that had become his prison to hand out the Iron Cross to members of the Hitler Youth, among the devastated remains of what had been the Chancellery’s garden.

It was his 56th birthday and the last time he would feel the brush of sunlight against his cheek. The occasion was marked by Russian soldiers firing on Hermannplatz and killing a number of people queueing outside the Karstadt department store.

“Through the fire-blackened ruins the scent of lilac rose in waves out of derelict gardens whose owners had fled or died,” Douglas Botting wrote of that spring in In the Ruins of the Reich (1985). “Crocuses struggled out of the rubble. The stumps of trees amputated by the bombing were bursting with green leaf. Only the birds were missing. There were no sparrows in the eaves, no thrushes singing in the Tiergarten.”

With only the hammering of saturation bombing by the Allies to listen out for, Hitler had suffered a total nervous breakdown on 22 April after becoming certain of defeat when he learned that Waffen-SS general Felix Steiner had disobeyed a direct order.

Steiner’s detachment had been instructed to attack Zhukov’s forces encircling the city from the north while the German Ninth Army under Theodor Busse approached from the south in a pincer movement. Steiner had baulked at so unrealistic a command, anticipating the massacre of his already-depleted forces, and declined to act on it.

“Hitler had been incarcerated in the bunker for over three months and his grasp on reality was fading fast,” writes Botting of the Fuhrer’s feverish state of mind. “Yet the palsied, enfeebled, prematurely aged old man in a soup-stained uniform living deep under the ground of the Reich Chancellery gardens continued to demand absolute obedience and fanatical resistance [and] continued to shriek nonsensical orders to non-existent or half-exterminated armies.”

Ranting tearfully and admitting the war was lost for the first time, the Fuhrer consulted his physician, Dr Werner Haase, later that same afternoon on the optimum means of committing suicide. It was Dr Haase, himself dying of tuberculosis, who recommended pistol-and-poison as the only truly foolproof method.

(Getty)

When Luftwaffe supreme commander Hermann Goering heard of Hitler’s outburst from Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, he dispatched a telegram asking him to step down in accordance with a 1941 decree naming Goering his successor. 

Persuaded by his secretary Martin Bormann that the Reichsmarschall intended a coup, Hitler had Goering relieved of his post, arrested by the SS and threatened with execution. Field Marshal Robert Ritter von Greim was summoned from Munich to replace him.

On 23 April, Eva Braun wrote to her sister Gretl, sending gifts of coffee and tinned food for their parents and giving instructions for the disposal of her gold and diamond watches, photograph albums and her love letters.

Within a week Berlin’s telephone lines would be dead, leaving short-wave radio transmitted from a tethered balloon the only means of communication between the bunker and the outside world.

The city’s streets continued to face heavy bombardment from Russian artillery fire, with the native citizens who had not succeeded in escaping left with little choice but to seek shelter in basements and candle-lit subway tunnels. The hospitals overflowed, supplies were scarce, disease and petty crime were rife and the only meat available was that which could be carved from dead horses.

Stores and private residences were looted for bottles of wine while some resorted to “Saturnalian orgies” or suicide to escape the hellishness of daily existence.

At 9pm on 28 April, a BBC report citing Reuters reached Hitler that Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler had approached the Allies with an offer to surrender, mediated by Swedish diplomat Count Folke Bernadotte. It had been declined but Hitler was infuriated that Himmler had assumed the authority to negotiate, branding him a traitor to the Fatherland and having his representative in Berlin, Hermann Fegelein, shot by firing squad in revenge.

That fact that Fegelein had married Gretl Braun and was therefore Hitler’s prospective brother-in-law did nothing to stay his hand.

General Hans Krebs and Bormann made desperate final appeals to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and Admiral Karl Donitz respectively to order their commanders to make a final push against the Soviets but, in truth, all was lost. The Russians had reached Potsdamerplatz, a single city block away from the Fuhrerbunker, while Busse’s Ninth Army had been brutally cut down on the Berlin-Dresden autobahn.

“Reich Chancellery a heap of rubble,” Bormann admitted in a telegram.

In the early hours of 29 April – and shortly after poisoning his beloved Alsatian dog Blondi and handing out cyanide pills to his secretaries, who concealed their mounting panic behind subservient smiles – Hitler married Braun in a civil ceremony witnessed by their peers and toasted half-heartedly with glasses of champagne, after which the dictator made out his last will and testament.

(Getty)

Hitler spent the rest of that day putting his affairs in order, giving instructions for his papers to be destroyed and saying farewell to his entourage, shaking hands and mumbling whatever words of consolation he could muster. Gertrude Junge, one of the secretaries, later remembered tears in his eyes: “They seemed to be looking far away, beyond the walls of the bunker.”

Historian William L Shirer recounts that, after the dictator retired to bed, “a curious thing happened. The tension which had been building up to an almost unendurable point in the bunker broke, and several persons went up to the canteen – to dance. The weird party soon became so noisy that word was sent from the Fuhrer’s quarters requesting more quiet”.

On his last morning on earth, a pallid Hitler is said by biographer Hans-Otto Meissner to have greeted Magda Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s unofficial “first lady”, by taking the gold party insignia from his grey overcoat and fastening it to her lapel with trembling hands, prompting her to burst into tears at the honour. It was the highest recognition ever awarded to a woman by the Third Reich.

The bodies of Adolf and Eva Hitler were discovered at 3.30pm that afternoon slumped on a bloody sofa by Joseph Goebbels, Bormann, Hitler’s adjutant Otto Gunshe and his valet, Heinz Linge.

(Getty)

The latter was so shocked by the sight he simply picked up a Dresden vase Hitler had upset when his body had slumped forward from the fatal gunshot, rearranged the tulips and daffodils within and returned it to its rightful place on a side table, the Fuhrer’s favourite portrait of Frederick the Great of Prussia glowering down upon the scene.

Their cadavers were swiftly wrapped in brown army blankets, doused in petrol and burnt in a trench in the same Chancellery grounds where Hitler had received the boy soldiers two weeks previously, just as his will had dictated. “I don’t want to be put on exhibition in a Russian waxworks,” he had told Gunsche, anticipating his eventual cremation.

Donitz and Goebbels succeeded Hitler as head of state and chancellor respectively. The latter and his wife would have their children put to sleep by lethal injection just a day later. It is believed that Magda administered the poison herself, a chilling act she appears to have plotted at least a month in advance.

She had confided as much to her sister-in-law from her first marriage, Ello Quandt, according to Anja Klabunde’s 1999 biography: “We have demanded monstrous things from the German people, treated other nations with pitiless cruelty. For this the victors will exact their full revenge. We can’t let them think we are cowards.

“We will take the children with us, they are too good, too lovely for the world which lies ahead. In the days to come Joseph will be regarded as one of the greatest criminals that Germany has ever produced. His children would hear that said daily, people would torment them, despise and humiliate them.”

Frau Goebbels wept but nevertheless played Solitaire with her husband after going through with the executions, all six of their offspring lying unwaking in their beds in matching white nightgowns. Their parents too would be dead within hours, their end mirroring the demise of the Hitlers.

Berlin surrendered to the Soviet Union on 2 May, the same day that the US armed forces newspaper, Stars and Stripes, carried the news of the Fuhrer’s suicide and succession in the plainest terms imaginable, its headline announcing simply: “Hitler dead”.

Germany’s total concession would follow six days later on a date now marked as Victory in Europe Day. But the true extent of the horrors with which Adolf Hitler’s name will forever be associated would only subsequently become known to the wider world, which, in that moment, came together to cheer his downfall in jubilant celebration, daring to imagine a brighter tomorrow.

(Source: Independent)

Merkel warns coronavirus crisis 'still just the beginning'

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said her country must remain "clever and cautious" in handling the coronavirus crisis, as it is "not the end phase but still just the beginning".

"We'll have to live with this virus for a long time," Ms Merkel told parliament ahead of an EU summit, via videolink.

She said Germany should be ready to "make very different, meaning much higher contributions to the EU budget".

The video summit - the EU's fourth on coronavirus - is now under way.

Chancellor Merkel has been widely praised for her handling of the crisis. AFP

EU leaders are expected to sign off on a new €540bn (£470bn; $575bn) emergency fund to protect European workers, businesses and countries worst affected by the coronavirus outbreak. The details are yet to be worked out.

The €540bn would be released through EU institutions that already exist, including the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the main bailout fund set up in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

European Council President Charles Michel told leaders they should aim to start releasing the funds by 1 June.

But a thornier issue is how much extra to commit to the EU budget to deal with this crisis, and how much the 27 member states will spend jointly. There are plans for a special recovery fund, like the post-1945 Marshall Plan.

Italy and some other states want EU help in aid grants, not loans. The scale of the crisis is such, they argue, that at least €1.5 trillion will be needed.

Mrs Merkel said extra EU budget funds should be provided "in a spirit of solidarity" and for a limited time.

Italy, at the epicentre of the pandemic in Europe, has been especially vocal in urging its EU partners to jointly guarantee debt.

But Germany, the Netherlands and Austria oppose any mutualisation of debt, in the form of so-called "coronabonds". Under current EU rules countries cannot be made liable for each other's debts.

French President Emmanuel Macron has sided with Italy and Spain in this crisis, warning that it threatens the very existence of the EU. 

Italy, Spain and France - in that order - have the highest European death tolls from Covid-19, each above 20,000.

On Thursday German officials said coronavirus cases nationally had risen to 148,046, and the number of deaths linked to Covid-19 had risen by 215 to 5,094.

Mrs Merkel said "it's the biggest challenge since World War Two, for the life and health of our people".

She urged "maximum discipline", to avoid stop-start lockdowns.

"We must not waste what has been achieved already," she said, praising the efficiency of Germany's healthcare system and the armed forces' role.

"The question of how we can prevent the virus from overwhelming our health system and subsequently costing the lives of countless people, this question will for a long time be the central question for politics in Germany and Europe."

The World Health Organization (WHO) says care home residents account for up to half of Covid-19 deaths in Europe, which is "a deeply concerning picture".

Mrs Merkel said Europe must strengthen its capacity to produce specialised medical kit, instead of depending on global supplies, which are now very stretched.

She also called the WHO an indispensable partner in the fight against the virus. President Donald Trump has suspended US funding of the body.

"I know how difficult the restrictions are, it's a challenge to democracy, it limits our democratic rights," she said, adding that democratic transparency, such as a free press, helped to make the situation tolerable.

"It's amazing how much understanding people have shown for each other," she said. MPs frequently applauded her.

EU summit chairman Charles Michel videoconferencing with leaders. European Council

Many Italians feel abandoned by the EU

Analysis by Mark Lowen, Rome correspondent

The old rifts from the eurozone crisis of 2009 - a supposedly frugal northern Europe versus a spendthrift south - have re-emerged with this outbreak.

The view from Rome is that a shared crisis needs a shared solution. Facing fierce opposition mainly from Germany and the Netherlands, Italy may no longer be wedded to its idea of "coronabonds" - debt mutualisation - but is still pushing for a financial package that does not penalise any single economy. That, after all, is the spirit of the common market that Italy helped create.

Many Italians feel abandoned by an EU that has hoarded protective equipment and closed borders.

Polls show anti-EU feeling is at its highest ever here. The leader of the hard-right Brothers of Italy party, Giorgia Meloni, told me the EU had shown its inadequacy and distance from the solidarity its members craved, peddling the idea of Italy as a beggar, wasting its money.

"The EU exists thanks to Italy," she said. "But it's now a system that favours others." Hers is the party steadily rising in the polls.

(Source: BBC)