Titans of History

But the Soviets defeated the Germans at Stalingrad in 1942–3. After their victory at Kursk in the summer of 1943, the Soviets slowly but inexorably destroyed Hitler’s empire, advancing all the way to Berlin. In June 1944, the Allies invaded northern France in the D-Day landings and started to fight their way to meet the Soviets in Germany itself. Yet an ever more deluded, brutal Hitler refused to countenance reality, demanding that his soldiers fight to the last man. As Germany was slowly crushed between the Red Army in the east and the British and Americans in the west, Hitler fled to the Führerbunker in Berlin on January 16, 1945, along with support staff and, later, Eva Braun and the Goebbels family. On April 16 the Red Army launched the Battle of Berlin, attacking in a pincer movement that swiftly smashed into the city.

Hitler spent his time ordering nonexistent armies to launch nonexistent offensives, denouncing his potential successors Goering and Himmler as traitors, and holding dainty tea parties with his devoted female secretaries. Elsewhere in the bunker, his SS guards and female staff held wild drunken orgies. On April 28, hearing of Himmler’s attempt to broker peace, Hitler furiously had SS officer Hermann Fegelein (Eva Braun’s brother-in-law and Himmler’s golden boy) shot in the Chancellery garden.

On April 29 Hitler married Eva Braun in a civil ceremony in the Führerbunker. The next day, Braun and Hitler swallowed cyanide capsules—previously tested on his dog, Blondi—and Hitler shot himself in the right temple. Scotching rumors that he escaped to South America, eyewitness claims that his body was burned were substantiated when officers of SMERSH (the Red Army counter-intelligence unit) discovered remains near the bunker, confirmed by dental records as Braun’s and Hitler’s. His skeleton was buried under the Magdeburg Soviet airbase in East Germany, then dug up and incinerated in 1970 on the orders of KGB chief Yuri Andropov. In 2000 part of the skull was put on display by the Federal Archives Service in Moscow.

NEHRU

1889–1964

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new; when an age ends; and when the soul of a nation long suppressed finds utterance.

Jawahalarl Nehru, fondly nicknamed Pandit-ji, was the first prime minister of India, which he ruled for almost twenty years, and the father of the greatest democracy on earth. Yet he was also an often-flawed politician whose socialistic planning policies held back the Indian economy, whose centralizing tendencies exacerbated the tragedy of Partition and whose foreign policies played into the hands of the Soviets. However his legacy is not just the success of democratic India but also the most successful political dynasty of modern democracy: in east Asia and the Middle East, dynasty is central to power. India was dominated by Nehru and his family and remains so well into the 21st century.

The descendant of lawyers to the East India Company, Nehru was the son of Motilal Nehru, a successful and wealthy lawyer, anglicized and sophisticated, who was one of the leaders of the Indian Congress Party, at times its president. Nehru was given the best English education, studying at Harrow School, which had been attended by that long-time foe of Indian independence Winston Churchill himself—and then Trinity College, Cambridge. But Nehru—who at Harrow and Cambridge was sometimes known as Joe Nehru—was involved with his father and Gandhi in the independence movement from an early age. At times he and his father were arrested together and Nehru, despite conflicts with Gandhi during the 1930s, had emerged as a leader in his own right by the start of the war. Nehru spent much of the time in and out of British jails as the British government wrestled with the challenge of whether to keep India or give it independence. There were rumors of Nehru’s schisms with Gandhi but the latter recognized him as his protégé and heir in 1941.