“The last hundred days of Hitler. Chronicle of the Apocalypse ”, by Jean Lopez, Tempus, 256 p., € 9.
“The judge and his executioner, followed by the suspicion” (Der Richter undhe Henker. Der Verdacht), by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, translated from German by Alexandre Pateau, Gallmeister, “Totem”, 300 p., € 10.90.
“The Night of Generals” (Die Nacht der GENERALE), by Hans Hellmut Kirst, translated from German by Pierre Kamnizer, new world, “composure”, 450 p., € 10.90.
[1945 !The apocalypse, that year, fell on Monday, January 15. Hitler, suddenly, decided to leave his headquarters in Wiesental, south of the Black Forest, to return to Berlin by road. Final return. A hundred days later, on April 20, at 3:30 p.m., reclusive in his bunker, after a plate of spaghetti, he shoots himself in the right temple; Eva Hitler, born Braun, preceded him in death by ingesting a cyanhyderic acid capsule. At 3:50 p.m., 200 liters of gasoline will leave bullied corpses of the newlyweds only some blackened remains that will be buried in a bomb hole. Deafening, the permanent cannonade of the Red Army seems to celebrate the event. Between these two dates, he died in Germany, bombed, shot, beaten, hungry or sick, 21 humans per minute.
If Apocalypse means above all disclosure, it can be said that these hundred days expose the historical substance of Nazism, a mixture of autocratic relentlessness, bureaucratic dementia and drunkenness of annihilation. An apocalypse of which the historian Jean Lopez gives us the chronicle almost hour per hour in, precisely, The last hundred days of Hitler.
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