What if Hitler had survived? (And how he could have escaped the bunker)

There were few better pilots in the Third Reich than Hanna Reitsch, and none more loyal to its leader, Adolf Hitler.

Her
flying skills and fanaticism were fully displayed on the night of April
26, 1945, when Reitsch landed her small Fieseler Storch plane on a
makeshift airstrip on the Tiergarten in the centre of war-ravaged
Berlin. 

Accompanied by General von Greim, the head of the
Luftwaffe, Reitsch made her way to Hitler's bunker, where she found a
scene of chaos. 

Conspiracy theories: A computer-generated image of what Hitler would have looked like had he survived into the 1960s

Drunken Wehrmacht officers caroused with secretaries, while nearby
artillery shells provided a rumbling background soundtrack of impending
doom. 

According to most accounts, Reitsch's mission was little more than an expression of her complete devotion to her Fuhrer.

The
Hitler she found in the dying days of the war was not a well man, his
gait shuffling, his face lined, his body coursing with a noxious
torrent of prescribed drugs. 

She expressed a wish to die alongside her ailing hero in an epic scene of Wagnerian drama.

But Hitler insisted that the fight was not over, and that although his
body was weak, his will still radiated the same power as it had back in
the 1930s. 

Hitler informed the 33-year-old pilot that her next task would be the
most important she would ever perform – she was going to help him
escape.