Eighty years ago today, the world was told that Adolf Hitler was dead.
(Disclaimer: I used A.I. to help distill aspects of these NYT archive articles)
Late on May 1, 1945, German radio broadcast the announcement that the Führer had died the previous afternoon in Berlin. “Fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism,” the report claimed. It was the final note of a regime steeped in self-mythologizing, disinformation, and spectacle—even in death.
The New York Times, in its May 2 front-page article, printed the statement without ceremony. But in London, the British radio—less bound by the gravity of neutrality—opened its commentary with a line borrowed from King Richard III:
“The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead.”
— William Shakespeare, as quoted on BBC, May 1, 1945
That single line, spoken of another tyrant brought low, echoed across the airwaves as a kind of cultural verdict. It was sharp, sardonic, and final.
The Editorial Voice of a Nation at War
In the same issue, the editorial board of The New York Times offered a more analytical obituary of sorts—one that moved past the battlefield and into the ideological and psychological architecture of Hitlerism.
“The serious-minded, cold-blooded and wholly humorless Germans had exalted Nazism into a religion which proclaimed Hitler not only the Führer of all Germans but also their god… He had to die with the cause he lost, and he had to die that way for two reasons. He had to save it from ridicule… and he had to perform one last service for that cause by helping to perpetuate the legend… that he and the Nazis were shining knights in armor fighting for European civilization against bolshevism—‘to their last breath.’”
— The New York Times, Editorial, May 2, 1945
The editorial rightly dismissed the propagandistic death notice as part of a final, doomed effort to shape legacy—to cast Hitler not as a failed tyrant, but as a martyred protector of “civilization.”
What Dies with the Man?
Even in its final hours, the regime sought to control not only the narrative of Hitler’s death, but the very memory of the man. The editorial noted:
“Logically, he had to die that way… Had he tried to evade his fate, it is difficult to believe that even his most devoted followers would have permitted him to do so.”
And so the figure who once stood before Nazi banners on May Day parades now died—ironically—on May Day itself. A sardonic twist of history. On the same day Joseph Stalin staged a victory parade in Moscow, Hitler’s world collapsed in the ruins of his own Reich Chancellery.
Eighty Years Later
What remains instructive about these accounts is not only how Hitler died, but how those closest to the moment refused to let myth override fact. The propaganda was immediate; the editorial clarity came just as swiftly. The news media—however imperfect—rose to the moment.
“The day is ours, the bloody dog is dead.”
It was not an epitaph. It was a clearing of the air.
