Three men dominated European and American affairs for more than a decade.
Two unleashed an unthinkable era of tyranny and destruction on Europe. One tried to stop them. All three died over the span of a few weeks in April 1945 –70 years ago.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945 in Warm Springs, Georgia. (The FDR Library offers brief biographical facts.) Elected for the first of four terms in 1932, Roosevelt was a towering figure in American politics. His death shocked America and came just weeks before the final victory over the Axis powers he had battled for years.
Partisan fighters executed Benito Mussolini –known as “Il Duce” (“The Leader”)– and other Italian Fascist leaders on April 28, 1945 near Lake Como. Hitler’s Italian ally, Mussolini and his Fascists had ruled Italy since 1922, taking dictatorial power in 1925. The bodies of the dead were taken to Milan and publicly displayed hanging upside down. (A BBC report of the death of Mussolini.)
Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945. He had ruled Germany since 1933.
Stars and Stripes reported Hitler’s death on May 2, 1945
On 30 April 1945, with the Red Army only streets away, Hitler killed himself in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in the city centre. His body was then taken out into the open, doused in petrol and set alight in a bomb crater.
“Hitler’s Ghost Still Haunts Berlin’s Psyche,” The Guardian April 25, 2015
Their deaths came as the war in Europe entered its final phase. American and British armies were racing through Germany from the West while the Soviet Red Army was crushing Nazi resistance from the East. The final assault on Hitler’s lair and the once mighty capital of Berlin was a brutal battle that left the city in ruins. This ghastly fight and the violent sexual assaults on Berlin’s women that followed were the prelude to a divided Berlin and Germany and fifty years of Cold War. That battle and its aftermath are the subjects of the “Berlin Stories” chapter in THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR.
The Hidden History of America At War-May 5, 2015 (Hachette Books/Random House Audio)
