The bunker lights flicker. Dust sifts from the ceiling with every impact above. A field telephone crackles, then dies. Someone slams the receiver down anyway, out of habit, out of fear. A map lies open on the situation table. Corners curled, red arrows stopping short of the city, like they’re ashamed to touch it. A pencil snaps in half.

 No one looks up. Footsteps rush in the corridor. A courier appears, face gray, holding a single sheet inside an oil cloth folder. Clean paper in a dirty war. Red wax, a sharp stamp, only for the furer. Martin Borman’s hand reaches for it first. Guring’s name sits at the top like a dare. A clark wets his lips, tries to read, fails, swallows hard.

Inside the room, men who have shouted orders for years suddenly whisper. Because this is not a battle report. This is a claim, a succession line, a trap. And when Hitler finally takes the page, he doesn’t rage. He goes quiet. Then he asks for one thing, and the answer decides Guring’s fate. This is the story of how Adolf Hitler in the final week of his life with Soviet shells landing within earshot of his underground command post turned on the man he once called his most loyal paladin. The man who had stood beside

him since the failed patch of 1923. The man he had named as his official successor. the man who just days before Germany’s total collapse sent a telegram that would be read as either a rescue attempt or a betrayal depending on who was holding the page. To understand the magnitude of what happened in that bunker on April 23rd, 1945, you first have to understand who Herman Guring was and what he had once meant to Adolf Hitler.

 Guring was not like the other Nazi leaders. He was not a failed artist like Hitler, not a failed academic like Gerbles, not a chicken farmer like Himmler. He was a genuine war hero. During the First World War, he had flown with the Imperial German Air Service, eventually taking command of the legendary Yagashvvada 1, the famous flying circus that had once been led by the Red Baron himself, Manfred von Richtoen.

 Guring had shot down 22 enemy aircraft. He had earned the poor leerit Imperial Germany’s highest military honor. When the war ended, he was 25 years old, decorated, respected, and utterly lost. The Treaty of Versailles had dissolved the German air force. The Empire he had fought for was gone. The Kaiser was in exile. Guring drifted through the early 1920s working as a commercial pilot in Denmark and Sweden, living off his reputation, searching for something to believe in.

 He found it in Munich in 1922 at a rally where a man with a harsh voice and hypnotic eyes spoke about Germany’s humiliation and Germany’s destiny. That man was Adolf Hitler. Guring was captivated. Here was someone who shared his sense of grievance, his hunger for restoration. [clears throat] Within weeks, Guring had joined the Nazi party.

 Within months, Hitler had appointed him commander of the SA, the Sturmab Tailong, the brown shirted street fighters who served as the party’s paramilitary muscle. On November 9th, 1923, Guring marched beside Hitler in the beer hall push, the failed coup that was supposed to launch a national revolution. When Bavarian police opened fire on the marchers, Guring was hit.

 A bullet tore through his groin. He collapsed in the street, bleeding while Hitler fled. Friends dragged Guring to safety and smuggled him across the border into Austria. For the next four years, Guring lived in exile, first in Austria, then in Italy, then in Sweden. The wound refused to heal properly. Doctors gave him morphine for the pain and he became addicted.

By the mid 1920s, he was a broken man, overweight, [clears throat] drug dependent, separated from his wife, living on handouts and fading memories of glory. But he never forgot Hitler. And Hitler never forgot him. This is crucial to understanding what happened two decades later in that bunker. Hitler valued loyalty above almost everything else.

 He surrounded himself with men who had been with him from the beginning. Men who had suffered for the cause, men who had proved their devotion when the movement was small and despised. Guring was one of those men. He had bled for Hitler. He had sacrificed his health, his career, his reputation. That created a bond that would prove remarkably durable and remarkably difficult to break.

 When the Nazi party reconstituted itself in the late 1920s, Guring returned. He was elected to the Reich in 1928 and quickly became one of the party’s most effective public faces. Where Hitler was intense and fanatical, Guring was jovial and charming. He could move in polite society. He could speak to industrialists and aristocrats. He could wear a tuxedo and tell jokes at dinner parties.

 He made the Nazis seem almost respectable. After Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, Guring’s rise was meteoric. He was named Minister of the Interior for Prussia, Germany’s largest state, which gave him control of the police. He used thatpower ruthlessly, creating the Gestapo and overseeing the first wave of arrests that crushed the Nazi party’s political opponents.

 He became president of the Reichag. He became Reich Minister of Aviation. He became commanderin-chief of the newly created Luftvafer, which he built from nothing into the most powerful air force in the world. By 1936, Hitler had named Guring head of the 4-year plan, giving him sweeping authority over the German economy. Guring accumulated titles and powers at a rate that no one else in the regime could match. Reich, master of the hunt.

Reich, master of forests, president of the Prussian State Council. He collected offices the way he collected art, voraciously, indiscriminately, with an appetite that bordered on the pathological. And through it all, he remained useful to Hitler. When Germany needed an air force, Guring built one.

 When Germany needed a smiling face to reassure foreign diplomats, Guring supplied the charm. He was not the most ideologically committed Nazi. He was not the most administratively competent. But he was loyal. He was effective enough. And he had been there from the beginning. That counted for a great deal in Hitler’s world.

 In June 1941, just days before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Hitler issued a secret decree that formalized Guring’s position. The language was unambiguous. If anything should happen to Hitler, Guring would assume all powers of the state. If Hitler were ever incapacitated or unable to act, Guring was authorized to take over.

 It was the ultimate expression of trust and the ultimate guarantee of succession. On paper, Herman Guring was now the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. But paper, as events would prove, meant very little when the real currency was proximity to a dictator’s ear. The cracks in the relationship began to show almost immediately after the decree was signed.

Operation Barbarosa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, was supposed to be a quick campaign. Another 6 weeks, another conquered enemy, another triumph for German arms. Instead, it became a grinding war of attrition that devoured men and material at a rate Germany could not sustain.

 And the Luftvafer, Guring’s great achievement, began to fail. It failed at Moscow in the winter of 1941 when German aircraft could not establish air superiority over the Soviet capital. It failed at Stalinrad in 1942 when Guring promised Hitler that the Luftvafer could supply the encircled sixth army by air and then watched helplessly as that promise collapsed along with an entire army of 300,000 men.

 It failed over the skies of Germany itself as British and American bombers began their systematic destruction of German cities. By 1943, enemy bombs were falling every night. The joke had become a curse. Hitler’s faith in Guring eroded steadily. The furer began excluding him from key military conferences. He criticized him publicly, humiliating him in front of other officers.

 He blamed him for every failure of the air war while taking credit for every success. Guring responded by retreating further into his private world of art collecting, hunting parties, and morphine. He grew fatter. He grew more detached. He spent more time at his lavish estate, Karenhal, and less time in Berlin. By the spring of 1945, Guring was a shadow of the man who had once built the Luftvafer.

 His uniform no longer fit properly. His skin had a grayish palar. His eyes were dull. When he attended military conferences, he often sat in silence, contributing nothing, absorbing criticism without response. The other leaders of the regime had begun to treat him as an irrelevance, a relic of an earlier era, tolerated out of habit, but no longer taken seriously.

And yet, the succession decree remained in force. Guring was still legally Hitler’s designated heir. No one had revoked it. No one had named a replacement. In the chaos of the collapsing Reich, that piece of paper still meant something. Or at least Guring believed it did. That belief would destroy him.

 On April 20th, 1945, Adolf Hitler turned 56 years old. The birthday celebration in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery was a grim parody of the lavish affairs that had marked earlier years. The guests gathered in the cramped underground rooms. Guring, Gerbles, Himmler, Shpear, Borman, Ribbentrop, the various generals and admirals who still clung to their posts.

 Above them, Soviet artillery was already shelling central Berlin. The Reich was collapsing on every front. Everyone in the room knew that the end was coming. The ceremony was brief. There were handshakes, murmured congratulations, a few awkward toasts. Hitler looked terrible, pale, stooped, his left hand trembling uncontrollably. He had aged decades in months, but he was still the furer, and so the rituals were observed.

 After the ceremony, most of the senior leadership made their excuses and left. Himmler headed north. Shar returned to his ministry. Ribbonrop departed for destinations unknown andGuring flew south to Burkis garden to his house on the Obisaltsburg near Hitler’s mountain retreat. The parting between Hitler and Guring was awkward. Neither man knew what to say.

 They had been together for more than 20 years through triumph and disaster, through the seizure of power and the conquest of Europe and now the ruin of everything they had built. Guring shook Hitler’s hand. Hitler said something. Accounts differ on exactly what. And then Guring was gone. They would never see each other again.

 2 days later, everything changed. On April 22nd, Hitler convened a military conference in the bunker. The news was catastrophic. An offensive he had ordered, Operation Clausvitz, a counterattack meant to relieve Berlin, had completely failed. The divisions he had counted on either did not exist or could not move. Soviet forces had encircled the city.

 There was no hope of relief from the west. There was no hope of relief from anywhere. For the first time in the war, Hitler broke down completely. He screamed. He raged. He cursed his generals, his soldiers, the German people themselves. He declared that everyone had betrayed him. He announced that the war was lost. something he had never admitted before, not even in private.

 And then he said the words that would set everything else in motion. He would stay in Berlin. He would not flee to the south. He would not try to escape. He would remain in the bunker until the end. And when the Soviets came, he would shoot himself. The officers in the room were stunned. Some tried to argue.

 General Wilhelm Kitle, the head of the armed forces high command, begged Hitler to reconsider. General Alfred Yodel urged him to leave the city while there was still time. Hitler refused. His mind was made up. He ordered everyone who wished to leave to do so. He would remain behind with a small staff.

 The conference ended in chaos. Officers stumbled out of the room, pale and shaking. Word spread quickly through the bunker. The Furer had given up. The Furer was going to kill himself. The Furer had declared the war lost. Among those who heard this news was General Carl Ker, the chief of staff of the Luftvafer. Kola had not been present at the conference.

 He had stepped out briefly, and he could barely believe what he was being told. He asked again and again. Did the Furer really say that? Did he really declare the war lost? Did he really say he intended to stay and die? The answers were yes, yes, and yes. Ker understood immediately what this meant. He was Guring’s direct subordinate. Guring was Hitler’s designated successor.

 If Hitler was incapacitated, if he was no longer able or willing to lead, the succession decree came into effect. This was not speculation. This was law. and Ker had a duty to inform his commander. That night, Kola flew to Bertis Garden. He arrived in the early hours of April 23rd and immediately sought out Guring. The two men met in Guring study and Kola delivered his report. He described the conference.

 He described Hitler’s breakdown. He described the declaration that the war was lost, the decision to stay in Berlin, the intention to commit suicide. Guring listened in silence. Then he asked the critical question. What exactly had Hitler said about the succession? Kola did not have a clear answer.

 Hitler had not explicitly invoked the decree. He had not said that Guring should take over. But he had said he was staying in Berlin. He had said he intended to die. He had said anyone who wanted to leave should leave. What did that mean? Was Hitler still in command or had he effectively abdicated? Guring consulted with others who were present at the Oberaltsburg.

Hans Lamurs, the head of the Reich Chancellery, confirmed that the 1941 succession decree was still valid. If Hitler were incapacitated, Guring was legally authorized to assume power. But what counted as incapacitation? a physical wound, a mental breakdown, a declaration of intent to commit suicide. No one knew.

 The decree had never been tested. There was no precedent, no guidance, no one to call for clarification. Guring spent hours agonizing over the decision. He was not, despite his reputation, a reckless man. He understood the dangers of acting prematurely. He understood that Hitler, even in his current state, might view any move toward succession as treason.

But he also understood that the Reich was collapsing, that someone needed to take charge, that negotiations with the Western Allies might still be possible if they were initiated quickly enough. And so at approximately 3:00 the afternoon on April 23rd, 1945, Herman Guring made the decision that would end his career.

 He drafted a telegram to Hitler. The message was carefully worded. It was respectful, almost differential. It invoked the 1941 decree. It acknowledged that Hitler had decided to remain in Berlin. It asked whether in light of this decision, Guring should now assume leadership of the Reich.

 It requested a reply by 10:00that evening, and it included one fateful clause. If no reply was received by the deadline, Guring would assume that Hitler was no longer free to act and he would proceed accordingly. Guring also sent a second telegram, this one to foreign minister Yoakim Fon Ribbonrop. It informed Ribbentrop of the situation and suggested that he come to Bertis Garden if Hitler did not respond.

A third message went to the commanders of the Luftvafer, putting them on notice that a change in leadership might be imminent. These telegrams were not sent secretly. They went through official channels. They were encrypted. But they passed through the communication center in Berlin, which meant they passed through the hands of the one man in the bunker who had been waiting years for exactly this opportunity.

Martin Borman. If Guring was the old guard, the decorated war hero, the public face of the regime, Borman was something else entirely. He was a bureaucrat, a paper pusher, a man who had risen not through charisma or military achievement, but through sheer administrative cunning. He had no public profile. He gave no speeches.

 Most Germans had never heard his name. But inside the bunker, he was the most powerful man besides Hitler himself. Borman controlled access. He decided who got to see the furer and who did not. He filtered the reports that reached Hitler’s desk, emphasizing some facts, suppressing others. He had positioned himself as Hitler’s indispensable aid, the man who handled all the tedious details so that the furer could focus on grand strategy, and he had used that position to wage a quiet, relentless war against his rivals. Guring was chief

among those rivals. The two men had despised each other for years. Borman resented Guring’s titles, his wealth, his arrogance, his assumption that he would one day inherit the Reich. Guring, for his part, considered Borman a glorified secretary, a man with no achievements of his own, a parasite who had attached himself to Hitler’s coattails. But Borman was patient.

 He was careful. He waited for the right moment. And now, with Guring’s telegram in his hands, that moment had arrived. Borman did not present the telegram to Hitler neutrally. He did not suggest that it might be a sincere attempt to clarify an ambiguous situation. Instead, he framed it in the most damning possible light.

 He emphasized the deadline 10:00 as if Guring were issuing an ultimatum to his own furer. He pointed to the message to Ribbonrop as evidence of a broader conspiracy. He suggested that Guring was attempting to seize power to negotiate a separate piece with the West to betray everything that Hitler had fought for. Some historians believe that Borman actually altered the telegram before showing it to Hitler.

 Changing words, adding emphasis, removing context that might have softened its impact. Others argue that no alteration was necessary, that Borman simply let the document speak for itself while providing his own poisonous interpretation. Either way, the effect was devastating. Hitler read the telegram. He read it again.

 He sat in silence for what felt like an eternity. General Hans Krebs and General Wilhelm Burgdorf stood nearby, watching, waiting. Borman hovered at Hitler’s shoulder, ready to press his advantage. Then Hitler spoke. His voice was quiet, dangerously quiet. He asked questions. What exactly had Guring said? When had he said it? Who else had received messages? He demanded to see the text of the 1941 decree.

 He turned the pages over in his trembling hands. And then he asked Borman a single question. What should be done? Borman was ready. He had already drafted a response. It was sitting in his pocket, prepared in advance, waiting for exactly this moment. The telegram stripped Guring of all his offices. It accused him of high treason.

 It ordered his immediate arrest. All it needed was Hitler’s signature. Even now, even in his rage, Hitler hesitated. Guring had been with him for more than 20 years. Guring had bled for him on the streets of Munich. Guring had built the Luftvafer. Guring had been at his side through triumph after triumph. To strike him down now in the final days felt like striking down the last fragment of the old movement.

 But the men around Hitler did not speak in Guring’s defense. Gerbil said nothing helpful. Burgdorf said nothing. Krebs said nothing. The silence was deafening. No one reminded Hitler that Guring’s telegram had been respectful, that it had invoked a legal decree, that it had asked for clarification rather than demanding power.

 No one suggested that the Reichkes Marshal, for all his faults, had served faithfully for two decades. Borman leaned in. “My furer,” he murmured, this is treason. Hitler signed the order. The telegram went out immediately. Guring was stripped of his command of the Luftvafer. He was stripped of his title as Reichs Marshall.

 He was expelled from the Nazi party. He was to be placed under house arrest pending further action. Themessage was clear. Herman Guring, once the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, was now a prisoner. At the Oberaltsburg, Guring received the news with stunned disbelief. He had sent a respectful inquiry. He had invoked a legal decree.

 He had asked for guidance from his furer and in return he had been branded a traitor. Within hours SS troops arrived at his estate. They surrounded the compound. They placed Guring and his family under armed guard. The Reichs Marshall was allowed to keep his personal effects, but he was forbidden to leave. He was forbidden to communicate with anyone outside.

 He was, for all practical purposes, a dead man waiting for the formality of execution. For the next 6 days, Guring remained a prisoner in his own home. He paced. He raged. He wrote letters of protest that were never delivered. He tried to understand what had happened, how a simple telegram could have destroyed everything he had spent decades building.

 He did not yet know the full extent of Borman’s manipulation. He did not know that his words had been twisted, his intentions distorted, his loyalty questioned by a man who had been plotting his downfall for years. All he knew was that he had been betrayed. Meanwhile, in Berlin, the end was approaching. Soviet forces had entered the city proper.

 Street by street, building by building, they were fighting their way toward the Reich Chancellery. The bunker shook with constant artillery impacts. The lights flickered. The air grew thick and stale. On April 29th, Hitler dictated his final political testament. It was a rambling document full of recriminations and self-justification, blaming the Jews for the war, blaming his generals for losing it, blaming everyone except himself.

 And buried in that testament was a final verdict on Herman Guring. Hitler expelled Guring from the party again formally for the record. He stripped him of all rights that might have been granted by the succession decree and he named a new successor. Grand Admiral Carl Dunitz, the commander of the German Navy, a man who had remained loyal to the bitter end.

 But there was one more order, one final act of vengeance. Some accounts suggest that Hitler in his final hours ordered Guring’s execution. The command was allegedly transmitted to the SS guards at Burkis Garden. The former Reichkes marshall was to be shot. The evidence for this order is disputed. Some historians accept it, others consider it rumor.

 But what is certain is that Guring was not killed. The SS officer in charge of his detention hesitated. He delayed. The chain of command was disintegrating. Communications with Berlin were sporadic at best. On April 30th, 1945, Adolf Hitler shot himself in the bunker. Ava Brown, whom he had married just hours earlier, took poison.

 Their bodies were carried up to the Chancellory Garden and burned as Hitler had instructed to prevent them from falling into Soviet hands. When news of Hitler’s death reached the Oberaltsburg on May 1st, the SS guards simply walked away. There was no one left to give orders. There was no one left to obey.

 The Reich had ceased to exist. Guring was free, or so he thought. He gathered his family, collected his belongings, and headed south toward the Austrian border. He believed, apparently sincerely, that the Americans would treat him as a dignitary. He was, after all, still the former Reichkes marshal. He was still the man who had built the Luftvafer.

 He was still, in his own mind, a figure of historical importance. On May 9th, 1945, Guring surrendered to elements of the 36th Infantry Division of the United States Army. He was wearing his medals. He was carrying a Marshall’s baton. He expected to be received with military honors, perhaps even invited to negotiate.

 Instead, he was photographed, processed, and shipped to an interrogation center. Within weeks, he was in a cell at Nuremberg, awaiting trial for crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg trials were the first international war crimes tribunal in history. 22 major Nazi leaders were indicted on charges including conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

 Guring was the highest ranking defendant, and he knew it. He saw the trial as his final stage, his last chance to defend himself and the regime he had served. For four months, Guring fought. He was by far the most aggressive defendant, cross-examining witnesses, challenging evidence, delivering lengthy speeches from the dock.

 He denied knowledge of the extermination camps. He insisted that he had tried to restrain Hitler’s worst impulses. He portrayed himself as a soldier and statesman who had simply followed orders, who had done what any patriot would have done in his position. The prosecution was not impressed. Chief American prosecutor Robert Jackson clashed with Guring repeatedly, sometimes struggling to control the proceedings as the former Reichkes marshal dominated the courtroom. But theevidence was overwhelming.

 Document after document, witness after witness, the full horror of the Nazi regime was laid bare. On October 1st, 1946, the verdicts were announced. Herman Guring was found guilty on all four counts. The sentence was death by hanging. Guring had one final act of defiance left. He had always said he would not be hanged like a common criminal.

 He had petitioned to be shot instead as befitting a soldier. The request was denied. On the night of October 15th, 1946, just hours before his scheduled execution, Yuring bit down on a cyanide capsule. The poison had been smuggled into his cell. How and by whom remains unclear to this day. Within minutes, Herman Guring was dead.

 His body was photographed, cremated, and the ashes scattered secretly to prevent any location from becoming a pilgrimage site for Nazi sympathizers. The man who had once commanded the mightiest air force in the world. Who had amassed a fortune in stolen art, who had dreamed of inheriting Hitler’s empire, left nothing behind but photographs and documents and the memory of crimes that would never be forgotten.

But the story does not end with Guring’s death. It ends with a question. What does the fall of Herman Guring tell us about the nature of power in a dictatorship? Because Guring’s destruction was not really about a telegram. It was not really about ambition or treachery or even the succession decree.

 It was about something deeper. The fundamental instability of a system built on personal loyalty to a single leader. Hitler demanded absolute devotion. He rewarded those who demonstrated it and destroyed those who did not. But absolute devotion creates its own pathology. It breeds paranoia because no one can ever be trusted completely.

 It breeds competition because the only way to prove your loyalty is to attack those whose loyalty is in doubt. It breeds isolation because honest council becomes impossible when disagreement is treated as betrayal. By April 1945, Hitler was surrounded by men who had spent years learning to tell him only what he wanted to hear.

 Borman had mastered this art better than anyone. He understood that power in the bunker did not flow from titles or military rank. It flowed from proximity, from access, from the ability to shape what the furer saw and heard. Guring, for all his titles, was hundreds of kilometers away. He was operating on incomplete information, trying to navigate a crisis without understanding the dynamics inside the bunker.

 His telegram was careful, legal, respectful, and utterly irrelevant. Because the question was never what the telegram said. The question was what Borman could make it mean. This is how dictatorships consume themselves, not with dramatic confrontations, but with whispered insinuations, not with evidence, but with interpretation.

The system that Hitler built was designed to prevent any challenge to his authority. And in the end, it prevented any possibility of rational decision-making. It destroyed the loyal along with the disloyal. It punished those who followed the rules along with those who broke them. Guring followed the rules. He invoked a legal decree.

 He asked for permission, and he was destroyed for it. The lights in the bunker flickered one last time. The dust kept falling. The maps kept lying. And somewhere in the chaos of those final days, a bond that had lasted more than two decades, forged in street battles and sustained through triumph and disaster, was severed by a piece of paper, a whispered accusation, and a dictator too broken to recognize loyalty when it stood before him.

 Herman Guring was many things, vain, corrupt, complicit in monstrous crimes. But in the end, he was destroyed not for what he had done, but for what Martin Borman convinced Adolf Hitler he intended to do. He was destroyed by proximity, or rather by the lack of it. He was destroyed by a system that made trust impossible and suspicion inevitable.

 And in that destruction, we see the final truth about the Reich that Hitler built. It was never really a state. It was a court. And in a court, survival depends not on competence or achievement or even loyalty. It depends on standing close enough to the throne to whisper in the king’s ear.

 Guring stood too far away, and Borman stood just close enough. That is why in the last week of April 1945, with the Soviet army at the gates of Berlin and the thousand-year Reich reduced to a concrete bunker and a few square miles of rubble, Adolf Hitler turned on the man who had been with him from the very beginning. Not because Guring had betrayed him, but because someone else convinced him that he had.

The telegram was just paper. The betrayal was in the interpretation. And in the dying days of the Third Reich, interpretation was the deadliest weapon of all. If this story gave you a new perspective on history’s darkest chapter, consider subscribing for more untold stories from World War II.