Hmm…interesting question. It assumes for the sake of argument that Hitler might have been willing to recognize in March 1945 that the end was near, a point which in itself could generate a lot of debate. On the one hand, his behaviour right up until the last few days of his life suggests that he was deluding himself that victory could still be achieved as late as April 1945. On the other hand, John Keegan has argued that Hitler was essentially rational until the end, and that he must have known since the fall of Stalingrad in February 1943 that the war was lost. Similarly, the director of the movie Downfall has suggested that Hitler’s rants in the Fuhrerbunker, in which he demanded that various (at this point largely non-existent) armies launch war-winning attacks against the Red Army, were simply a case of cynical manipulation of his underlings rather than evidence of self-delusion.
Anyway, right off the bat, I’d draw a distinction between what options Hitler might realistically have considered and what I might have done if I’d been in his place. Hitler’s options from his perspective might have gone like this:
“Stay in the Reich Chancellery bunker and command the Battle of Berlin” is more or less what he did – though “command the Battle of Berlin” is a job that, in practical terms, was actually done by generals like Heinrici more than by Hitler – so that’s obviously a realistic option and one that fits his character.
“Take an U-Boat to South America” would have presented some logistical problems during the Battle of Berlin, since Hitler would have needed to leave Berlin and get to the coast, but in March 1945 this would not have posed any difficulties. The choice of a port of embarcation would have needed to be considered. France was in Allied hands at that point, so to get to the open sea without having to take the long and narrow route through the Danish Straights and the Kattegat, Hitler would have had to board the sub in northwest Germany – probably Wilhelmshaven or Bremen or Hamburg. I can’t recall if those cities were already in Allied hands at that point. The big problem is that getting from there to South America would require a long-range Type IX submarine, which were a minority in the German fleet; the more numerous Type VIIs probably didn’t have the range to get all the way to South America without at-sea refuelling. An added problem is that the Atlantic was a hazardous place for U-boats in 1945, since the Allies by then had good air cover for their convoys. On the other hand, a U-boat carrying Hitler into exile would have done its best to avoid the convoy lanes, so that would have increased its chances of crossing the Atlantic to South America. The next big problem, however, becomes “where in South America?” It’s not as if any old country would do. Brazil, which occupies a large portion of South America’s northeast corner and east coast , was an Allied nation. Argentina had Axis sympathies, but it’s much further away. I think Paraguay was also Axis-leaning, but it’s even harder to reach by submarine: it’s completely landlocked.
“Risk taking a U-boat to Japan” is out of the question because, to my knowledge, no German U-boat had the range to sail halfway around the world without refuelling. Japan did have large, long-range subs which could (and in a few cases did) sail from Japan to Germany, but it’s pretty improbable that Hitler could have arranged with Japan for him to escape in this manner. The organizational problems would have been large, and the Allies would probably have found out about it by monitoring and decoding the required radio traffic. Besides, Germano-Japanese cooperation in WWII was nothing to write home about. Furthermore, I can’t picture Hitler hiding out in Japan, in a country whose language and culture were utterly alien to him, among “Asiatic” people he regarded as racial inferiors. It also begs the question of why he would have bothered to hide in a country that was itself close to military collapse under attack from the Allies, since this wouldn’t have bought him much time.
By the way, Hitler was hardly the sailor type. Spending weeks aboard a WWII sub would be tough on most people; in his case, the prospect would have been a nightmare.
“Fly to Norway to continue the fight” would have been practical from a flying point of view but not from a combat point of view. Germany’s military / industrial infrastructure (what was left of it in 1945) was in Germany, not Norway.
“Travel to your home in the Alps” is, I believe, what he wanted Eva Braun to do. From Hitler’s point of view, however, Berchtesgaden would simply have been a comfortable place to wait for the Allies to capture him – a scenario which could hardly have appealed to him.
The “shave your mustache and hide among the chaos of Germany 1945” option is precisely what Heinrich Himmler did. He was soon captured and identified by the Allies, at which point he committed suicide by biting into a cyanide capsule. Had Hitler tried the same thing, I expect that the outcome would have been similar.
“Surrender to the West” would have been a more palatable option than “surrender to the Red Army” (which even Hitler at his most irrational would never have been foolish enough to do), but not by much. The best he could have expected from surrendering to the West was to be tried and executed as a war criminal, assuming that he didn’t simply get shot on sight by a G.I. who’d seen Frank Capra’s film “Prelude to War”, which at one point shows still pictures of Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito while the narrator says, “If you ever see them, don’t hesitate.” As for surrendering to the Russians…well, as I recall, one of the lines of dialogue which Alec Guiness has in the film in which he portrays Hitler addresses the problems with doing so: “They want to parade me naked through the streets of Moscow!” Frankly, I think that Stalin would have come up with much more unpleasant retribution ideas than that one.
One option which isn’t on the list is one that I might have taken if I’d been in Hitler’s place. There were vague plans in 1945 to set up a Nazi partisan organization, code-named Werwolf, that would keep fighting after Germany had been overrun. The plan was more myth than anything else, but if there had been actual substance to it I might have allowed myself to be persuaded to go underground with this group and maintain a kind of “Nazi government in internal exile”. I doubt, however, that it would have been able to sustain itself for long, with Germany completely occupied by the Allies.
