Dennis Foder writes in response to me:

>>Yet in those darkest final hour in the doomed Berlin bunker, Hitler
>>enacted a suicide staged like the death in the closing scene out of
>>Wagner ...
>
>Sometime after four, three SS men carried Hitler and his wife aloft and
>deposited their bodies in a shallow trench, poured gasoline on them and
>in three tries, because of a brisk wind, finally succeeded in ignting the
>bodies.

Some authors have suggest that Hitler's career can be interpreted as
an enactment of (in my opinion his sickeningly perverse distortion of)
Wagner's ideas.  Predictably the suggestion has to be made that Hitler's
ideas WERE Wagner's ideas, and that Hitler was merely the Enactor the ideas
his Prophet, Wagner.  I refer you to: 'Wagners Hitler.  Der Prophet und
sein Vollstrecker' by Joachim Koehler ISBN: 3442755476.  The suggestion
is made that the Hitler's final suicide was possible also an enactment
of a Wagner music-drama.  Perhaps the reason for him ordering his body to
be burnt was that he thought of it as a funeral pyre akin to that in the
immolation scene of 'Goetterdaemmerung', with Hitler as a kind of Siegfried
and Eva Braun a kind of Bruennhilde.  It does make sense.  It is a theory
that will do much to help keep Hitler alive as the currently most deeply
respected interpreter of Wagner, when really this should be evidence of how
ridiculous the National Socialist interpretation was.

Satoshi Akima