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Eighty years ago this week the curtain falls on Europe's dictators

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  Mussolini was captured by communist partisans as he tried to escape. On party orders he, his mistress Clara Petacci   and other fascist companions  were shot. Their bodies were taken to Milan and hung by their ankles from the girders around a garage on the Piazzale Loretto where fifteen people chosen at random had been murdered in 1944 as a reprisal for partisan attacks.  Hitler married his mistress Eva Braun in a civil ceremony at the Fuehrerbunker.  He tried out a cyanide pill on his Alsatian dog Blondi and, once he was sure it was effective, gave one to his wife to kill herself. He then shot himself dead. Hitler had named his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels to succeed him as Reich Chancellor. He spent only one day in the office and then he and his wife  killed themselves, first having murdered six of their young children. His wife's son by her first marriage was a prisoner of war in British hands and survived the war. Marshal Petain left Switzerlan...
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Eighty years ago this week the Luftwaffe makes a huge and pointless sacrifice

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  On New Year's Day the Luftwaffe launched Operation Bodenplatte (floorplate), a series of attacks mainly by fighter aircraft on allied airfields.  The operation had originally been planned for December 16th to gain air superiority for the Ardennes offensive.  Bodenplatte achieved tactical surprise and perhaps 400 allied aircraft were destroyed or damaged. However as these were on the ground, aircrew casualties were light. The allies were able to replace the lost machines rapidly whilst the 200 odd German losses were nearly irreplaceable. Worse, the pilots lost with them certainly could not be replaced. The ground offensive had already come to a halt so whatever operational value there might have been had evaporated.  Bodenplatte was a marginal tactical victory for the Germans, but a strategic calamity. In the words of fighter commander Adolf Galland, "We sacrificed out last substance." The Red Army completed the encirclement of Budapest trapping two German SS div...
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Eighty years ago this week British intelligence refutes Soviet fictions about Hitler's fate

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  Hugh Trevor-Roper, history don turned wartime intelligence officer, published the results of the investigation that he had undertaken into the fate of Hitler at the behest of the British authorities. The investigation aimed to remove the veil of mystery cast by the Soviets who had occupied Berlin and with it the Fuehrerbunker so were thus far better placed to know the truth.  The Nazis had claimed that Hitler had died fighting . Stalin preferred to hold out the possibility that or, even claim, that Hitler had survived. The democratic states could be accused of harbouring Hitler with the intention of restoring Nazism.  Trevor-Roper had established the truth that Hitler had shot himself after Eva Braun, whom he had just married, died by poison. The Soviets did not respond in any way and it took another five years before they accepted something approaching the truth. In the meanwhile  Trevor-Roper had written a book on Hitler's last days which made h...
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