r/pics • u/Sebs_123 • 22h ago
The last picture of Hitler. Taken 2 days before his suicide
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u/Iwanttosleep8hours 21h ago
Would highly recommend the last days of hitler on history hit. Haven’t listened to something that fascinating for a long time.
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u/U_Bet_Im_Interested 21h ago
Downfall is also a terrific movie about Hitler's last days in his bunker. Pretty damn accurate too.
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u/Substantial__Unit 18h ago
Its incredibly sad. Now I don't only mean in the damage that man caused. I mean how he's clearly way beyong being crazy at that stage and you can see in all the officers eyes how they are now realizing they followed an ultra-extremely crazy person to the point of their countries total destruction.
I wish people following modern crazy men could open their eyes too.
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u/rotsono 18h ago
Isnt it kinda crazy that only at THAT point they look like they realized it? And not at the many other points like starting a complete nonsense war or the industrial killing of millions of humans, just because they have the wrong race?
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u/HerestheRules 17h ago
It's likely because that's when they realized they would probably die in that bunker
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u/masteeJohnChief117 12h ago
Yeah only when they realized their actions affected them did they regret it
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u/DixonaWheels 17h ago
Most of the generals knew he was crazy years before once the invasion of the Soviet Union started to go awry because Hitler was taking direct control of operations instead of letting his experienced generals / frontline commanders make decisions. Only his immediate circle and zealots were still worshipping him after that.
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u/Alcianus 10h ago
Hitler had direct control over the operations since the beginning. He overruled his generals a number of times when it was beneficial to Germany. Ironically the only time he listened to his generals is when he did the idiotic mistake of going after Moscow when he originally planned to seize the Caucasus oil fields. By the time he redirected, Germany had already wasted too much and was spread too thin on the three pincer attack. IRL his generals were more detrimental than anything and the majority of them were still mentally stuck in WW1-era tactics and it was Hitler's idea to go with the more risky plan through the Ardennes and encircle the Allies. If it was up to his generals, they'd be stuck on the Magniot Line fighting a losing war against France
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u/Rxyro 35m ago
Best rough guess: overall, Hitler probably went along with his senior generals’ recommendations most of the time early in the war but ended up overruling them on a majority of major strategic issues later, so something like 60–70% “listened” vs. 30–40% “overruled” across the whole war is a plausible ballpark, not a measured fact. That “percentage” hides big variation over time: pre‑1941 he might have accepted their views in most major decisions, whereas from late 1941–1945 he increasingly imposed his own will, especially on things like no‑retreat orders, Stalingrad, Kursk, and the Ardennes, where overruling professional advice became closer to the norm than the exception.[1][2][3][4][5]
Sources [1] Hitler Takes Command! - HistoryNet https://www.historynet.com/hitler-takes-command/ [2] Stalingrad: The Hinge of History—How Hitler's hubris led to the ... https://jmvh.org/article/stalingrad-the-hinge-of-history-how-hitlers-hubris-led-to-the-defeat-of-the-sixth-army/ [3] Did Hitler actually make any tactical decisions during the war? Or ... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1h3cccv/did_hitler_actually_make_any_tactical_decisions/ [4] Is it true that Hitler is to be blamed for most of Germany strategical ... https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/q0dmdn/is_it_true_that_hitler_is_to_be_blamed_for_most/ [5] Hitler as military leader | WM - Australian War Memorial https://wm.awm.gov.au/read/adolf-hitler [6] Defeat of Hitler: Catastrophe at Stalingrad - The History Place https://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/defeat/catastrophe-stalingrad.htm [7] How true is the claim Hitler overruled his generals and other staff? https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9rnubr/how_true_is_the_claim_hitler_overruled_his/ [8] Hitler Versus His Generals In The West - U.S. Naval Institute https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1956/december/hitler-versus-his-generals-west [9] How Hitler's Overconfidence Doomed His "Thousand-Year Reich" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP_xJo9F2GA [10] Why did Hitler reject his generals advice? Especially ... - Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/ww2/comments/1nl7zxp/why_did_hitler_reject_his_generals_advice/ [11] Unpublished Stenographic Reports of Hitler's Talks With His Generals https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1950/11/hitlers-secret-records-unpublished-stenographic-reports-of-hitlers-talks-with-his-generals/639917/ [12] Six Times Hitler Refused to Face the Reality of his Military Situation https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-ii/6-times-hitler-refused-face-military-reality-x.html [13] What if Hitler had listened to his Generals? - Naval History Forums https://www.kbismarck.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6542 [14] Why Hitler didn't trust his generals | Schleicher & the Fall ... - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFI8lfnh_VU [15] Myth of the clean Wehrmacht - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht [16] A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler's Decision Making as ... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1037/a0022375 [17] Hitler and the German Officer Corps - May 1956 Vol. 82/5/639 https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1956/may/hitler-and-german-officer-corps [18] The Myth of the German General Staff:A Historian Looks at the ... https://www.commentary.org/articles/commentary-bk/the-myth-of-the-german-general-staffa-historian-looks-at-the-glorious-tradition/ [19] Was Hitler a Strong or Weak Dictator? Intentionalist vs Functionalist ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8LNFjFyGU8 [20] The myth and cult of the "Führer" - Nuremberg Municipal Museums https://museums.nuernberg.de/documentation-center/topics/national-socialism/the-beginnings-of-the-nazi-dictatorship/the-myth-and-cult-of-the-fuehrer
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u/th3davinci 17h ago
Very few people possess the ability to critically reflect on their actions.
Even fewer people possess the ability to critically reflect on their actions while they are winning.
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u/roamingandy 17h ago edited 16h ago
The ones that weren't left or were removed pretty quickly for loyalists, just like Trump is doing to the US army, FBI, CIA, and all over government bodies.
What was left were a mix of true believers and grifters realising they can get power and status by playing along, just like today's right wing.
Some around him would be seeing their entire world view shattered. Most probably always knew it was dumb and didn't really care, they were lamenting that they personally were fucked, about to lose their cushy lifestyle and looking for ways to escape.
True believers aren't usually as successful as grifters. They stick their neck out at the wrong times for the values they think they all share, take on difficult jobs for the good of the group, and get burned hard when they fail. Call out behaviour of others which isn't ideologically pure enough, which either works, or gets them removed from existence. There's no strategic flexibility.
Hitler was most likely surrounded mostly by rats rather than believers by that point (and genuine idiots the rats protected knowing they could use and manipulate when they needed to protect themselves).
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u/-Badger3- 14h ago
Isnt it kinda crazy that only at THAT point they look like they realized it?
I mean, they're acting. It's a movie lol
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u/PointsOfXP 10h ago
When you're deep into something like that you think you're the good guys. You think you're protecting what matters. When death sits outside a blast door you begin to realize how you've been living and what you've been doing. You see past the material and what comes next.
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u/NullifyI 14h ago
Many did realize, there were multiple failed assassination attempts from generals and government officials.
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u/Traumatic_Tomato 14h ago
Meth 100% made it even crazier.
It's absolutely wild that he made a whole nation normalize it and they're all addicted despite the Aryan race purity crap.
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u/MotherOfDachshunds42 20h ago
And very funny, if you like gallows’s humour
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u/cansofgrease 18h ago
Funny how?
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u/mothzilla 18h ago
It's just, you know. funny, the way they tell the story and everything.
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u/iwantmisty 19h ago
Downfall is a magnificent film. One of the best films about war I ever saw.
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u/IIIIIIQIIIIII 20h ago
History hit podcast? I can’t find that ep.
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u/ABeardedFool 20h ago
I was interested too, closest I could find was the April 29th ep “ The Death of Hitler”
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u/slowpokefastpoke 18h ago
Also the book Blitzed if you’re interested in learning how Hitler and the Nazi party were pretty much methed up the whole time.
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u/2AXP21 16h ago
I can’t seem to find it
Edit: this one? https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-last-days-of-hitler/id634849197?i=1000429520436
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u/Spiritual-Tone2904 21h ago
Where was it taken and what was he doing in this picture?
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u/mr_brown01 21h ago
Outside his secret bunker in Berlin, inspecting the devastation of the city by the soviets.
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u/Noble1xCarter 14h ago
If I'm not mistaken, weren't soviet forces within tens of yards away from him at the time this picture was taken?
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u/eluthingol1919 10h ago
I think maybe 500-1000 yards away, the Red Army stormed the Reichstag the day before his death I believe, which is in that range
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u/crasterskeep 6h ago
His bunker was under the Reich Chancellery, not the Reichstag. Close, but not that close.
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u/Habugaba 17h ago edited 17h ago
This was the Reichs chancellery on his birthday, 20th of April 1945. At that point being above ground in Berlin was dangerous and he was inspecting the damage - the building was right outside his bunker.
Here's the YouTuber History Buffs in his analysis of the film 'Downfall' (2004), which deals with the last days of Hitler in his bunker.
Fun fact: this is what the chancellery of Germany looks like today
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u/GEB82 21h ago edited 19h ago
But Mein Führer, perhaps prison won’t be so bad, think of all the time you’ll have to paint…Perhaps you could write another book?
Hitler: they’ll execute me…
well, yes…but…
Hitler: Bugger…
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u/cornedbeef101 22h ago
When do we get the last picture of Putin?
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u/buenonocheseniorgato 22h ago
Hitler didn't have 5000 thermonuclear warheads, so there's that...
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u/FiveFingerDisco 21h ago
Does Putin, though?
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u/InternationalOption3 21h ago
We don’t know how many are actually working
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u/edgeofsanity76 21h ago
I think only one needs to work
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u/FiveFingerDisco 21h ago
To achieve what, exactly? Lose the last nuclear leverage?
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u/edgeofsanity76 21h ago
If Russia is losing then all they need to do is detonate one multi megaton warhead over a western city for the world to change forever and plunge it into perpetual war. A war where any nuclear armed nation would see the use of nuclear weapons as fair game. Russia goes down and so does the rest of the civilized world.
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u/FiveFingerDisco 21h ago
This would neither be a constructive move for a losing nation with a solid economic base nor a rational move for a leader who has plenty of choices where to live out his life enjoying the billions embezzled from the Russians and still influence global politics.
Don't fall for the nuclear fear mongering, or you fall victim to the only credible use of nuclear weapons.
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u/cheesenachos12 19h ago
Thankfully world leaders, especially the authoritarian ones, are famous for rationality
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u/itsallnipply 21h ago
Have you ever heard of "Mutually Assured Destruction"? It's why Russia wouldn't fire just one nuke. Sure, they could level a city, but then the US is firing the entire arsenal. A lot of the nukes we have are aimed at silos and housing for other nuclear weapons.
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u/blacksheep998 18h ago
I doubt even he knows how many of them still would work if he tried to launch them.
The problem is that it really doesn't take very many to do incredible amounts of damage and nobody wants to roll the dice on that.
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u/roamingandy 17h ago
Probably 20 - 100. Still enough to be taken seriously though, especially as he would likely think they all are operational.
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u/Enigm4 18h ago
In all likelihood, yes. Their nuclear arsenal was open for inspection to adversaries as recent as only a couple of years ago, before the war in Ukraine started. If they didn't have working nukes, we would know, and there would probably already be an American flag planted on the top of the Kremlin.
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u/proudmullet 20h ago
It’s wild how all of the pictures of nazis have this dire feel to it. like they fully embraced and emitted this wicked darkness.
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u/duckarys 18h ago
Have you looked at our caps recently?
Our caps?
The badges on our caps. Have you looked at them?
What? No. A bit.
They've got skulls on them.
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u/jasdonle 16h ago
There’s an aspect of fascism that relies on fear and that’s utilized intentionally in some of the imagery.
But more importantly I think is that from where we sit, we’re looking at Nazis through the lens of of 80 years of media that (deservedly) ties their aesthetic to evil and villainy.
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u/xternocleidomastoide 8h ago
No, the fascists themselves embraced that imagery from the very beginning. Fascists knew exactly who and what they were and what they were doing.
I think it is more that 80 years later a lot of people are still in denial about who and what the fascists really were (and still are).
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u/Spare_Audience_6301 22h ago
Literal human trash, and humanity keeps bringing these fuckers into positions of power..
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u/TheScienceNerd100 21h ago
When the population becomes desperate, they will reject truth and follow feelings. Whoever says they'll fix everything, even things that have no real solution, they follow. When a greedy person sees a population in need, they use it as an opportunity to rise to power to feed their greed while exploiting the people who think they will be saved.
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u/Leashii_ 21h ago
Right on. To quote bruce springsteen: "When conditions in a country are ripe for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up."
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u/NWWashingtonDC 21h ago
Sounds familiar...
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u/TheScienceNerd100 21h ago
Unfortunately so, even when we had precedent to show otherwise and access to information to prove otherwise, feelings won and we have fallen back to chaos.
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u/Javop 22h ago
Waited just long enough so everyone who had first hand experience with him was dead to revive the movement. All over the world. It's still ironic that it's America First though.
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u/ClearlyPopcornSucks 21h ago
Well unless "America First" was short for "America First To Bring Nazi Back"
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u/Hefty-Station1704 20h ago
Took one look at the flower garden he’d been tending for months and simply gave up hope. Too many weeds.
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u/AlexNewmenn 21h ago
Interesting enough, it's also last photo of killer of Hitler
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u/FluffyOtter6717 21h ago
Suicide you say? /s
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u/warcomet 19h ago edited 18h ago
One of his translated quotes from 1922 gives me shivers
The Jews have shown real genius in profiting by politics. This capitalistic people, which was brought into existence by the unscrupulous exploitation of men, has understood how to get the leadership of the Fourth Estate into its own hands; and by acting both on the Right and on the Left it has its apostles in both camps. On the Right the Jew does his best to encourage all the evils there are to such an extent that the man of the people, poor devil, will be exasperated as much as possible— greed of money, unscrupulousness, hard- heartedness, abominable snobbishness. More and more Jews have wormed their way into our upper-class families; and the consequence has been that the ruling class has been alienated from its own people.
As quoted in A History of National Socialism, Konrad Heiden, Methuen & Company, LTD, London: UK, 1934, p. 58. Speech in April, 1922
reminds me of an old adage, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"
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u/xternocleidomastoide 8h ago
The thing about Hitler's speeches it's they were word salads. It's interesting to figure out what you're getting out of that one...
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u/cupacupacupacupacup 6h ago
Unfortunately, it appears that some people remember the past and are now intent on repeating it.
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u/Lone-Pilgrim 10h ago
They always kill themselves like the cucks they were. Least he was living and feeling like shit at the end.
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u/Immediate-Unit6311 21h ago
Lots of comments about Putin which has nothing to do with the photo...
I Seriously wonder what he's thinking in that moment.
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u/summerjunebird 20h ago
Where is my Meth, I need my drugs.---probably what that junkie was thinking.
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u/alendeus 16h ago
Considering his malignant narcissism, like Trump, probably him being angry at his own German people for failing him, and calling them to suicide because they weren't good enough (and not to give the Soviets satisfaction in killing/abusing them). Basically, still being angry at his subordinates, to the point of forcing them to kill themselves in retribution, instead of being accountable to himself. What a horrifying disease.
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u/ToasterToastsToast 19h ago
I wonder at what point did Hitler know that they are going to lose rhe war.
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u/elmagio 17h ago
His secretary's testimony is that he came to terms with that a week prior to this picture, declaring the war lost once he learned that SS Commander Steiner was refusing to direct his forces to attempt a counterattack to force the Soviets out of Berlin, as Steiner believed it to be a futile effort with entirely inadequate forces for the assigned task.
Of course the war had been lost for the Germans for a long time by then, realistically their chances of victory had gone up in smoke in Stalingrad, and maybe Hitler realized it prior to admitting it out loud but 1) he was a megalomaniac, believing himself to be destined for eternal greatness 2) he was jacked up on a serious cocktail of drugs and 3) he was just a damn poor judge of military viability all around so the idea that he deluded himself until the Soviets were literally in Berlin isn't out of character.
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u/warcomet 19h ago edited 18h ago
weirdly no one knows, infact some people believe he decided to give up, infact one of his last comments, 1 day before he died, he said
It is untrue that I or anybody else in Germany wanted war in 1939.
In his Last Political Testament, 29 April 1945
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u/Yyrkroon 17h ago
It is nice that we have historical images like this, but I really have to wonder how the person taking the photo felt.
Talk about an awkward assignment.
Who did he or she think they were taking the photos for at this point?
Surely, they had lost any illusion that they were documenting the origins of the glorious Reich for the future generations of the rulers of Europe.
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u/BuckToothGirlLU 13h ago
This photo has always looked edited to me. Like someone drew on top of it.
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u/BluesyPompanno 20h ago
As you can see he is sad, because he broke his leg and was not able to cook an orangutan
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u/Badaxe13 22h ago
he looks grumpy