My husband's dad and Hitler

This post was written by my husband, Erich Almasy

Today is the 75th anniversary of the day that the American public learned that Adolf Hitler was really dead after taking his own life in his underground Berlin bunker on April 30th (or May 1st). It seems strange today that our Russian “allies” who occupied the bunker’s sector in Berlin kept secret the details of Hitler’s death and that 50 days would pass before the Western Allies would know the truth.

According to the June 20, 1945 front page story in the New York Times, my father, Canadian Army Sergeant Otto Almasy, and his colleague in the 10th CounterIntelligence Corps, British Army Captain K. W. E. Leslie, interrogated German policeman Hermann Karnau and determined that Adolf Hitler was in fact dead, thus becoming the first Western Allied soldiers to confirm his death. During the nearly two months previous, rumours had abounded about the Nazi leader’s escape, with unconfirmed sightings of Hitler in Argentina, the Vatican, and South Africa. Karnau was one of Hitler’s police sentries and witnessed the burning of the bodies of the Nazi leader and his recently-wed wife, Eva Braun.

My younger sister and I grew up hearing very few war stories, since Papa, like most WWII veterans was loathe to speak of it. But I do remember mention of him being the first (sic) Allied soldier to know that Hitler was dead. I’m not sure how much I believed it then, but a few years after his death in 2004 I discovered the online New York Times archive that contained the front page article below. 

One final remembrance about my father. In January, 1990 as part of his first-return trip since the war, we travelled to his former home of Vienna and then visited Berlin just two months after the fall of The Wall. We still needed to pass through Checkpoint Charlie, although there was a large hole in the final barrier that two teenage girls dashed through so they could get a picture with an East German VoPo (Deutsche Volkspolizei) guard. Yes, selfies existed before the iPhone.

My father was quite philosophical about the liberation exuberance we saw everywhere in Berlin and as we took our personal souvenir pieces of The Wall he commented that in his life he had seen tyrants more than democrats. He wasn’t positive that even the United States was immune from autocracy but he hoped that like Germany, if it ever came to that, maybe we could force a similar change.