ADOLF HITLER DEAD: a good news day for an exhausted Britain. Yet there was a tentative tone to the Times’s coverage of the passing of the Führer — no trace of triumphalism, no sense of it being a red-letter day.

There were legitimate reasons for caution. First, the Second World War was continuing. Admiral Doenitz, who announced the death on the radio — after half an hour of tempestuous Wagner and funereal Brückner — made plain that the German Army, now under his command, would carry on fighting.

Doenitz, Hitler’s chosen successor, was a bit of a mystery. He had been a prisoner of war in Manchester during the First World War. Did that make him more or less of a friend of Britain? The Times diplomatic correspondent wrote approvingly that Doenitz was not much of a Nazi. But could he be bluffing, buying time for Hitler to make a bolt for it? Certainly Times readers, after years of tracking Hitler, had never heard of the Führer actually leading troops into battle. The very idea was ridiculous. But there it was, in the words of Doenitz: “Hitler fell at his post in the Reichs Chancellery fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism.” The words rang false.

The truth emerged only in the following month, after the smoke of battle had cleared. Far from dying a soldier’s death, Hitler had anguished over poisoning his alsatian dog, Blondie, and then sitting alongside his hastily married mistress, Eva Braun, shot himself. That was on April 30, two days before this report appeared.

The paper had a good crack at making sense of events. Count Bernadotte was reported to have come back from his mediation mission empty-handed, unable to meet Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. Ten days earlier Himmler had discussed surrendering unconditionally to Britain and the US. Now, The Times asked, how would Himmler fit in with Doenitz? How was this offer supposed to square with Doenitz’s commitment to fighting the “Bolsheviks”, Stalin’s Red Army? The diplomatic correspondent saw a clear split.

What was not known on May 2, 1945, was the depth of Hitler’s fury with Himmler. Doenitz, having been told that he was Hitler’s successor, asked Himmler to come to his headquarters in Plön, northern Germany. The Admiral, still unsure if Hitler was really dead, knew that he was obliged to carry out the Führer’s final orders. Himmler — convinced that he was now the natural leader — showed up with an escort of six SS men; Doenitz hid a pistol under the papers on his desk, unsure how the meeting would end. He handed Himmler the telegram appointing him successor; the SS leader “seemed to shrink as if punctured by a pin”, Doenitz said later. Himmler begged to be made second-in-command but was shown the door. By the end of the month, he had been stopped, in disguise, by a British soldier. The man who had hoped to be the new Hitler bit on a cyanide tablet and died. Doenitz was sentenced to ten years in jail at Nuremberg.

Times readers of the day, one suspects, had already discounted Hitler. He was the third war leader to die, after Roosevelt and Mussolini, in just over a fortnight. For a decade, Hitler had moved from being a clown to having almost demonic status. Now he was an irrelevance. It is enough to glance at the map of the rapidly shifting battle fronts: the Third Reich had shrunk to a mere sliver of land between advancing armies. Children begged their parents for these maps, clipped them out and pinned them up in their bedrooms; theirs was the true excitement in those final days. The question being asked was if Hitler was actually alive and in Russian hands. In fact the recent opening of archives in Moscow archives has shown that Stalin himself was not wholly convinced of Hitler’s death.

In The Times of May 2, is a fluent and thoughtful account of Hitler’s life, diplomacy and leadership. Modern readers will notice that it makes no mention of the Holocaust.There is barely a nod to young Hitler’s “fanatical aversion” to the Jews. But that is a reflection of the sheer ignorance in May 1945 of what had been happening in the concentration camps.

And much of the text woud have been prepared in advance, and updated at short notice. It is, within those confines, a remarkable piece of analysis — few of its judgments would be questioned even now. There is even an attempt at the kind of even-handedness that distinguished Times obituaries of that era. Yes, he was “the incarnation of absolute evil”. But the writer gives him credit as a true unifier of Germany and as a charismatic public figure: Hitler “cannot be denied the most remarkable talents”.

For readers who had laboured through five years of war, this was a daring verdict. The analysis also skates over the prewar years when the Times editorial line leant, in the view of critics, towards appeasement. “I spend my nights,” wrote Geoffrey Dawson, the Editor at the time, “taking out anything which I think will hurt their [German] susceptibilities, and in dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them.” By March 1939, The Times had adjusted.

It was an extraordinary day. But the reader, nervous about the world after war, may have spent as much time scanning the letters page (the development of industry, coal and electricity) and the preparations for VE Day (shops to open for a few hours to permit purchases of bread, milk and rations; bonfires to be lit only with rubbish of no salvage value; no full street lighting even during the celebrations) than the details of Hitler’s rise.

And there, at the bottom of the page was a sign of things to come: London threatened with a road transport strike. Bus drivers were preparing to work to rule. It was time to get on with life after Hitler.