It was 80 years ago, on April 30, 1945, when Adolf Hitler died by suicide with Eva Braun, his bride of 24 hours, just before the end of World War 2.
The Nazi monster didn’t want to be taken alive by the Allies, who were storming Berlin and closing in on the Führer’s bunker.
Over the years, there have been some major dramatisations of Hitler’s final days based on eyewitness accounts, featuring the German dictator’s last birthday and his futile attempts at counterattacks against the Soviets.
The late Bruno Ganz starred in the excellent 2004 German-language film Downfall, which is currently unavailable for streaming, but two other films with British stars are.
The first is 1973’s Hitler: The Last Ten Days, starring future Obi-Wan Kenobi Sir Alec Guinness as the tyrant. The film is based on an eyewitness account by Gerhard Boldt, who was in the Führerbunker during the Third Reich’s downfall. This movie is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, while the other one below is streaming for free.
The second is a 1981 TV film called The Bunker based on the 1975 book of the same name. Sir Anthony Hopkins, who would go on to portray Richard Nixon, Pope Benedict XVI, Alfred Hitchcock, CS Lewis, Sigmund Freud, David Lloyd George and John Quincy Adams, stars as Hitler. The two-time Oscar winner would win a Emmy for his chilling portrayal of the Nazi leader in the film which is streaming for free on Plex.