Occasionally he effects a moment of warmth and affection, as if the evil is the corruption of all that’s good and true within him, but his obsession with conquest (or, at least, holding Berlin from the oncoming Russians) drags him down again into a dark place within his soul. At times he swings wildly between a morbid fascination with suicide and the hopes that he might survive or that his dreams might outlive him. In the moment, facing an uncertain future in which Hitler’s ardent and fevered dream is slowly dismantled, perhaps it seems evident that his followers are lost in the quixotic power of his cult of personality. But it is those who choose to lay down weapons and outlive the war that can fathom a world without Hitler in it, and it is that cornerstone upon which the reconstruction of Germany can begin and the Nazi dream of restoration and victory can die. Hitler’s ideology may have run deep, but Berlin looks weary and swollen with fear due to the weight of the bombings that it has had to endure.
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