"I Choose Death". The Last Will and Testament of Adolf Hitler: Discovery, Dissemination & Containment

Writing in spring 1945, the diarist William Shirer expressed his amazement that Adolf Hitler should have seemingly met his end without making at least one, grandiose final statement. Instead, the Nazi dictator appeared to have just 'vanished', quietly taking his own life within the privacy of his Berlin Führerbunker.  Seven months later, however, a routine search of a newly arrested press secretary in Hanover revealed a copy of Hitler’s personal will and political testament sewn into his coat lining.  Shortly afterwards, two more copies of Hitler’s final words were discovered - in different parts of occupied Germany.  Fundamentally, these sources could be held up as supporting, documentary evidence of Hitler’s death, with the Nazi leader stating firmly that he was choosing to die, and explicitly ordering the destruction of his corpse. But there was genuine concern among the wartime Allies about the disruptive impact Hitler’s final writings could have upon emerging occupation policy.  At a time when the Allies were embarking upon war crimes trials, denazification and re-education programmes across Germany, Hitler’s will constituted a powerful, symbolic – and potentially dangerous – cultural artefact, one that could fan new flames among the dying embers of National Socialism. In the UK, intense debate thus emerged within Cabinet, Foreign and War Office circles as to whether these documents should be disseminated freely or supervised closely; preserved for posterity as a warning from history, or destroyed altogether to prevent any resurgence of Nazism.  As this paper shows, however, the materials could not be easily contained. Before long, they had not only gained press notice, but copies of the will had also entered assorted postwar exhibitions across the UK and United States.

Caroline Sharples is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Roehampton. Her research interests concern memories of National Socialism and representations of the Holocaust and its perpetrator. She is the author of West Germans and the Nazi Legacy (Routledge, 2012), Postwar Germany and the Holocaust (Bloomsbury, 2015) and, with Olaf Jensen, editor of Britain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). She is currently writing a cultural history of the death of Adolf Hitler and the seminar paper invites a critical discussion of both information control and how to handle the ‘dangerous dead’.

- this seminar is free to attend, but advanced registration is required.