How The Adolf Hitler died the true death

True death of Hitler

The German announcement of Hitler's death was quickly translated by Ernst Gombrich, a supervisor in the German Monitoring team who went on to become a renowned art historian.

" He wrote it out on bits of paper, which was a terrible thing to do because he might have muddled them up, and he had terrible handwriting," says his former colleague.

" He did it for speed because we usually typed things or wrote them out neatly.

Ernst Gombrich then phoned the Cabinet Office in London to tell the government. BBC newsrooms were also informed and broadcast the news to the nation and the world.

Now 97, Karl says he remembers an entire nation cheering the news.

For him personally, it meant he could see his parents again. His father, Walter, had run a wholesale millinery business in Cologne, which he was forced by the Nazis to sell for next to nothing before he and his wife, Edith, fled Germany, eventually reaching the US.

A thousand people were working at BBC Monitoring at Caver sham Park by the time of Hitler's death. Among them was a senior Italian monitor, Doris Penny, who became Karl's first wife.

It was late in the evening on 1 May 1945 and Karl Lehmann was working at his desk on the outskirts of Reading, 40 miles (65 km) to the west of London.

Soviet forces were closing in on Berlin, and the war with Germany had reached its final stages.

The 24-year-old was monitoring German state radio when listeners were told to prepare for an important announcement.

" They played solemn music, and then they said Hitler had died," he recalls. "They said he had fallen fighting Bolshevism. It was announced in a very somber way."

He and his younger brother, Georg, had been sent from Germany to Britain by their parents nine years earlier to escape the Nazis' increasing persecution of Jewish people. Their father was a German Jew.

" I felt total relief because [Hitler] had ruined my life."

Karl Lehmann was working at BBC Monitoring, set up on the eve of World War Two. Its main aim was to listen to, translate and inform the British Government about radio broadcasts from Germany and its allies, as well as from other countries.

" We were the first people in Britain to hear the announcement, he remembers. "The whole building cheered. We realized how important it was. It meant the end of the war against Germany.

It was not for another six days that Germany officially surrendered.

While there was no doubt that Hitler was dead, it emerged only later that he had killed himself.

" Fallen meant 'died in active combat' - we heard a big lie," Karl says.

" They didn't admit he had committed suicide because that would have been the end straight away. But that was the Germans themselves announcing over their radio that Hitler was dead. It was as official as you get.

The newsreader also said that Hitler had appointed Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz as his successor.

He was a terrible writer and his speeches were unimpressive when you read them in the German but totally different when he spoke. He relied on his oratory. It meant we wouldn't have to translate him anymore.

That's how a cold-blooded leader died Thanks