Last Days of the Reich

In the final months of World War II, Adolf Hitler was holed up in a bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, convinced that providence had chosen him to lead Germany. A bomb had exploded just meters from him on July 20, 1944, wounding him but leaving him alive. "I regard this as a confirmation of the task imposed on me by Providence," Hitler declared. That survival, the episode explains, did not sober him—it radicalized him. He became more paranoid, more medicated, and more convinced that he alone could reverse Germany's collapse. The result was a final gamble that would cost hundreds of thousands of lives and drag the German people into total ruin.

The Ardennes Offensive: Hitler's Hail Mary

By the fall of 1944, Germany was squeezed between the Western Allies and the Soviet Red Army. Hitler knew that a passive defense would fail. He quoted Frederick the Great, who had said, "We're gonna fight this war until one of our goddamn enemies gets tired." So Hitler devised a plan to return to the scene of his greatest triumph: the Ardennes Forest. In December 1944, he launched a massive offensive across a hundred-mile front, aiming to crash through a thinly held portion of the American line, cross the Meuse River, and seize the Allied supply port of Antwerp. Hitler believed this would divide the coalition and force a negotiated peace.