Hitler's Final Days in the Bunker

On 16 April 1945 three Russian Army groups launched  the last offensive of the European war against the Seelow Heights before attacking Berlin, with 193 divisions and 2,500,000 men and women, 6250 tanks, 41,000 artillery guns and mortars, 4,200 rocket launchers, and 7,500 aircraft. Barely 85 German divisions faced them, with 1,000,000 soldiers, 1,500 tanks, and 10,000 guns.

Tired and undersupplied, the Germans fought hard to allow civilians to escape the Russians to the West. Surrender to the English or the Americans was preferable, as the bitter fighting on the Eastern Front meant that neither German or Soviet soldiers were inclined to accept prisoners. Many were simply shot.

Slowly but surely the forces of the Red Army moved through Berlin . The German Army did not have the means to halt Marshall Zhukov’s troops and the Red Army’s ability to call on mechanized armour seemed unlimited. Civilian and military casualties in Berlin were appalling. Regardless of this, Adolf Hitler clung to his belief that the German Army would defeat Zhukov’s eight armies in Berlin. Aides watched as he spoke about grandiose German armoured formations that would defeat Zhukov in Berlin. In reality, the Red Army was up against exhausted troops effectively at the end of their fighting ability, Hitler Youth troops armed with the anti-tank weapon, the Panzerfaust, and the male elderly who had been forced into a civilian’s militia which was expected to make a last stand.

Any signs of surrender were dealt with harshly by the SS. In the Kurfürstendamm Boulevard, SS squads shot any householder who put a white flag outside of their house.

Adolf Hitler was based in his Bunker underneath the Reich Chancellery building. Bomb proof and with its own air recycling plant, the complex had been built without a proper communication system. The only way staff officers could know about the extent of the Red Army’s movement into Berlin was to phone civilians at random [if their phones worked] to ascertain if the Red Army was in their vicinity.

On the night of 29 April 1945, Hitler received news from Field Marshall Keitel that Berlin would receive no more troops and that the city would be lost to the Russians. General Weidling, given the task of defending Berlin, believed that his men would stop fighting that night due to their ammunition running out.

Though there seems little doubt that Adolf Hitler had already decided that suicide was his only option, and also that of Eva Braun’s, it is probable that these two pieces of information moved that nearer. Hitler had also received confirmation that Mussolini had been caught in Italy, shot and his body, along with that of his mistress, Clara Pettachi, had been hung upside down in a square in Milan. Above all else, Adolf Hitler had decided that such humiliation would not happen to him as he ordered that his body should be burned.

On 30 April, Hitler gave very clear instructions to his personal adjunct, Otto Günsche, that both his and his wife’s body should be burned. After lunch, both Hitler and Eva Hitler [as she wanted to be called] met his inner circle in the ante-room chamber of the Bunker. Here Hitler said his farewells.

None of the Bunker’s survivors heard the shot that killed Hitler. At 15.15 on 30 April 1945, Bormann, Göbbels, Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, Otto Günsche and Artur Axmann, Head of the Hitler Youth, entered Hitler’s sitting room. Günsche and Linge wrapped the body of Hitler in a blanket and carried it to the Reich Chancellery garden. Eva Braun’s body was also carried up and laid next to Hitler’s. Both bodies were laid near to the Bunker’s exit. The bodies were drenched in petrol and set alight. A small group, including Bormann, Linge, Otto Günsche, Josef Göbels, Erich Kempka, Peter Högl, Ewald Lindloff, and Hans Reisser, raised their arms in salute as they stood just inside the Bunker doorway.

Göbbels later committed suicide. Bormann disappeared and his body was never found, sparking off rumours that he managed somehow to flee to South America.

The last defenders in the area of the Bunker complex were volunteers of the 33rd Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS Charlemagne [1st French], who remained until the early morning of 2 May to prevent the Soviets from capturing the Bunker on May Day. With them, in the remnants of the Nordland Division - also Waffen-SS - were young Danes and Norwegians, still with a few heavy tanks.

Why did everyone in the Bunker hear the shot?

The 'death room' had concrete walls two feet thick, a reinforced concrete ceiling sixteen feet thick, and there were two four inch thick hermetically gas-proofed doors between the bodies and the witnesses. If the shot was fired in Hitler's sitting room it was an absolute impossibility for those in the map room to have heard it. After all, a 7.65 mm Walther makes a sound about equal to bursting a child's party balloon.

Witnesses who were standing by the double doors to Hitler's study, claimed they heard nothing.

Those who did make this claim in 1945 withdrew it, saying  Allied interrogators pressured them into saying it.

Some people who claim to have heard a shot were not even present at the scene.

Those who did make this claim in 1945 withdrew it, saying  Allied interrogators pressured them into saying it.

Some people who claim to have heard a shot were not even present at the scene.

If a shot had been fired in this gas proof room, the smell had no way to escape 

The witnesses appear unanimous on the small "German Silver Mark" size bullet hole in "Hitler's right temple" but no one makes mention of an exit wound. According to experts, when a bullet from a 7.65mm Walther PPK is fired into the head, there is an almost 50/50 chance that it will become lodged in the skull. Since no bullet was ever found in the Bunker, either lodged in a wall or the floor, if the members of Hitler's entourage were telling the truth that he had shot himself, the bullet probably became lodged in his skull.

Representatives of the Walther firm which manufactured the pistol concerned are adamant. If the muzzle was placed against the head as it was discharged an exit wound the size of a closed fist should be on the other side of the victim's head. The only way the corpse could be in the condition described by the witnesses was if the shot was fired from a distance of ten or twelve feet.
 

On 30 April 1945 momentous events were in the making in the Bunker where the Führer was holed up to conduct the last-ditch defence of Berlin. East of the beleaguered city General Helmuth Weidling’s 56 Panzer Corps had disintegrated without trace and the fiery General had been appointed as the new battle commander of Berlin. To the north of the city SS General Felix Steiner’s 7th Panzer Division and 25th Panzer Grenadier Division were stalled at Eberswalde while the Russians had already swarmed across the River Havel to encircle the besieged city. Hitler ordered Steiner's Army to attack and relieve Berlin. With few working tanks and roughly a division's worth of infantry, Steiner chose the life of his men over the life of the Nazi leadership, and declined to attack.

His failure to attack the Russians advancing on Berlin earned Hitler's contempt.

The Führer was unaware that his trusted Armaments Minister Albert Speer had secretly arranged with Colonel-General Gotthard Heinrici of Army Group Vistula for Berlin to be abandoned to the Russians so as to preserve his architectural landmarks and industrial installations.

During the 1940 Blitzkrieg when the Germans swept through France, Paris had been declared an open city [un-defended] for the same purpose of preservation. Now as the Third Reich was crumbling the wily Albert Speer was looking to his own place in posterity. The Gatow and Tempelhof airfields were now cut off and Russian tanks were amassing south of Potsdamer Platz for the final assault on the Reich Chancellery. General Theodor Busse’s 9th Army was encircled south-west of Berlin and the only encouraging news was that Field-Marshal Schörner’s Army Group operating in Czechoslovakia had inflicted heavy losses on the Russians while trying to fight their way through to relieve the city. General Walther Wenck’s 12th Army now at Potsdam was the Führer’s main hope for relief of the city but Russian spearheads were already reported to be trickling into the Tiergarten.

In collaboration with the treacherous Heinrici, Colonel-General  Hasso von Manteuffel’s 3rd Panzer Army and other elements of the Army Group were heading across Mecklenburg deliberately by-passing Berlin towards the haven of Allied lines so as to avoid Russian captivity. Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel [Chief of Defence Staff at the Führer's HQ] lost no time in dismissing both these senior commanders for their disobedience of orders, but such orders were now becoming ineffective.

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler were finally expelled from the Party and stripped of all functions for their gross disloyalty, and Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz was designated as successor to the Führer. Field-Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, the only person to shine as a real Warlord on the Russian front, was proclaimed the new C-in-C Army after the Führer‘s death.

As the minutes ticked by, Hitler was constantly enquiring about the progress of General Wenck’s spearheads who were specially earmarked to relieve the city.

Around mid-day the Führer summoned all his female secretarial staff who had volunteered to stay in the Bunker for a farewell lunch and delivered his least oration, unlike all those previous occasions when he had been addressing dozens of his Field-Marshals at war conferences:

"I wish that my Generals could have been as brave as you are, but they betrayed me and they bear responsibility for this destruction of the Fatherland".

Handing out cyanide capsules to each of the staff, he apologized profusely that he was unable to offer them kinder farewell gifts.

Even now at the twelfth hour the Führer was still living in his dream-world that General Wenck’s relief columns would somehow reach the beleaguered city but his spearheads were stalled to the south as the 12th Army was gradually disintegrating.

By now the Russians were fighting in the subway tunnels under Friedrichstrasse and Vossstrasse, they were at Weidendamn bridge and Potsdamer Platz with spearheads already pouring into the famous Tiergarten. Within a matter of hours they would reach the Reich Chancellery.

The loyal General Hans Krebs [Chief of General Staff] informed the Führer that there was now little hope of General Wenck’s relief columns reaching the battered city.

The Russians are now virtually on the doorstep and Berlin has essentially fallen. Outside, Russian artillery splinters the concrete. German sharpshooters, one of the last line of Hitler's crumbling Bunker defence, scan the terr

The business of war limps to an end as those who have served Hitler and the Third Reich come to terms with defeat and Hitler's proposed suicide. Hitler tells them he has considered shooting himself, slitting his wrists and taking poison.

"The war is lost,'' he screams. "I will never leave Berlin ... I would prefer to put a bullet in my head". 

He commands that after his death his body is to be destroyed: nothing is to be left for the Russians. 

There are many others in the Bunker. All are hard men of the Third Reich, architects of the Holocaust and a war machine that killed tens of millions of soldiers and civilians and devastated Europe. They are stunned by the anticipated suicide of one man.

Among them are war criminals and some of them cry for Hitler. There is cognac on the table. Many take a few swigs. Others are so shocked by the imminent loss of their Führer they are too overcome to speak clearly.

They know they are to be part of yet another of the great dramas of the 20th century: the last living moments and death of Adolf Hitler.

Later, about 40 people, including those directly outside the door of Hitler's quarters when he and his wife, Eva Braun, killed themselves, would be questioned about what happened.

The conclusion by a tribunal that exhaustively examined the last days in the Bunker was that Hitler and Braun killed themselves on 30 April 1945: Hitler shot himself in the right temple with his personal pistol, a Walther 7.65. Braun took cyanide. Hitler's other weapon, a Walther 6.35, believed to have been prepared for use by Braun, had not been fired.

The final moments inside the Bunker are disputed by historians and by the witnesses who were there when Hitler died. The truth of Hitler's death has always been laced with political and personal interest; witnesses from the Bunker who gave accounts of the dying days of the Third Reich to Allied interrogators and in biographies could not always agree on what had happened.

German author Ulrich Völklein, author of "Hitler's Death: The Last Days in the Führer Bunker", has perused the Soviet interrogation records of Otto Günsche, Hitler's adjutant, and Heinz Linge, his valet.

Echoing what he had exclusively related to British historian David Irving in 1967 -- who donated copies of the Soviet interrogation records to German archives later -- Günsche said that he, Linge, and Martin Bormann entered the Führer's private rooms in the Berlin Bunker when they smelt gunpowder.

Braun was lying on a sofa. Hitler's body was slumped over the right side of a chair.

Irving first described this in his book "Hitler's War" [The Viking Press, 1977]:

"Blood was dripping from his right temple, a pool of blood was already on the carpet," Günsche testified to the Soviets, "It was immediately apparent that he had shot himself from his own pistol, a PPK 7.65mm which eight days previously after an emotional conference [on 22 April 1945] he had taken out of his bedside table and carried with him constantly, loaded".

Linge confirmed that he saw the Walther PPK 7.65 on the floor to the right of Hitler's body, and the 6.35 next to his left foot. Günsche sketched the guns' position also for David Irving in 1967.

After burning the bodies, as he also told the British writer, Günsche picked up the pistols, unloaded them and put both pistols in his pocket and later gave them to a Lieutenant Hamann, the adjutant to Artur Axmann, head of the Hitler youth movement.

Hamann fell into Soviet hands. Stalin is claimed to have kept the 7.65 in his study.

The book "Quest" [Melchior & Brandenberg, 1990] quotes  Axmann as stating that he buried Hitler's death gun under the Sandkrug bridge in Berlin.
 

Hitler Youth Leader Artur Axmann recalls in "That Can't Be The End" standing in a room in the Bunker with Göbbels and Martin Borman, with Göbbels saying: "Was that a shot?"

"Otto Günsche  came out and said: 'The Führer is dead. It was 15.30. With Göbbels  and Bormann, I followed Günsche  into Hitler's living room ... Later Otto Günsche  told me Hitler had shot himself in the right temple ... Eva Hitler had poisoned herself.

"Otto Günsche  gave me the 7.65mm pistol, with which Hitler had shot himself, and also the 6.35mm pistol which in recent times, he had carried always in his pocket."

Axmann later revealed he hid them on a railway line but could not find the spot when he returned years later. 

Heinz Linge in "Until The End",  recalls smelling gunpowder outside Hitler's room. "I went into the room where a number of people were standing around Martin Bormann. I did not know what they were talking about. In any case, they did not know what had happened. I signalled to Bormann to come with me to Hitler's study. I opened the door and went in,'' writes Linge.

"Bormann followed me. He was chalk-white and stared helplessly and questioningly at me. On the sofa sat Adolf and Eva Hitler. Both were dead. Hitler had shot himself with the 7.65. The 7.65 and his 6.35 pistol, which he had in reserve should the larger weapon fail, lay near his feet on the ground." 

Völklein and others refer to the commander of Reich security and head of Hitler's personal bodyguard, the SS officer Hans Rattenhuber, who told his Russian jailers in May, 1945: "Hitler had poisoned himself with cyanide, and his valet Linge, 10 minutes later, shot him to ensure he was dead."

In "The Last Days with Adolf Hitler", Hitler's driver, Erich Kempka, writes: "Bormann, Linge and me heard the shot and stormed into the room. Dr Stumpfegger came to examine the body. Göbbels and Axmann were called."

However, Lev Besymenski, the Soviet historian, writes Kempka, within a matter of days, changed his version of events: First he said Eva Braun had shot herself, then he spoke of poison: first he spoke of two shots in the room, then of one shot.

Kempka was one of those responsible for burning Hitler's body. He was detailed on the afternoon of 30 April to deliver 200 litres of gasoline to the garden outside the Bunker, but was only able to obtain 180. He left the Bunker on the following day.

Despite claims made to the contrary during his interrogation, Kempka later admitted that when Hitler and Eva Braun locked themselves in a room to commit suicide, he lost his nerve and ran out of the Führerbunker, returning only after Hitler and Braun were dead. By the time he returned to the Bunker, Hitler and Braun's bodies were already being carried upstairs for cremation.

Despite his questionable reliability, many interviewers quote Kempka in their accounts of Hitler's suicide because of his colorful [and raunchy] language. For example, one interviewer, James Preston O'Donnell, recounted the following quips in his book, "The Bunk

• He referred to General Hermann Fegelein as having "his brains in his scrotum". [Fegelein was executed by Hitler for trying to desert Berlin with his mistress].
• He remarked that when Magda Göbbels was around Hitler, you could "hear her ovaries rattling". [Magda Göbbels was said to be quite attached to Hitler psychologically].
• When Martin Bormann carried Eva Braun's corpse out of the Bunker, Kempka took the body from him and insisted on carrying it up himself, remarking that Bormann was carrying Braun "like a sack of potatoes". [Bormann and Braun had a mutual dislike].
• At the Nuremberg trials, Kempka was called to testify because he claimed to have seen Martin Bormann killed by a Soviet anti-tank rocket.

A myth to refute is the myth that Hitler, almost by magic, ceased his functioning. How? By suicide!

That is an example of magical thinking. The Allies wanted him out, so he magically committed suicide. How convenient!

The whole suicide story of Hitler rests solely on the concocted testimony of four fanatical Nazis, Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, Otto Günsche, Hitler's Adjutant, Hans Baur, his personal pilot and Johann Rattenhuber, the Chief of Bodyguards. They were all vigorously trained to guard Hitler's personal secrets, even under the threat of torture and death.

The fabrications were made up as the "witnesses" went along, even changing their own stories! Incredible!

While he was interned for several years in two Soviet POW camps in Strausberg and Posen, the Wehrmachtsurgeon-general, Major-General Walter Schreiber, had the opportunity to speak with four persons, each of whom had been present in the Bunker until Berlin fell to the Soviets. While he was unable to draw any information on the subject of Hitler's fate out of the "arrogant" Wilhelm Mohnke.

However, in a statement for Soviet authorities dated 18 May 1945, Möhnke wrote:

"I personally did not see the Führer's body and I don't know what was done to it".

Hitler's pilot Hans Baur told him only that he had never seen Hitler dead. Heinz Linge and Otto Günsche were more forthcoming. Linge told him that he "did not see Hitler, but toward the end noticed two bodies wrapped in carpet being carried out of the Bunker". Linge told Schreiber that while at the time he had assumed the bodies to be those of the Hitler couple, only later had he been told that this was the case. This admission is astounding, because Linge is the one person mentioned by all eyewitnesses as having carried Hitler's body up the stairs and into the Chancellery garden.
 

Heinz Linge firsthand account of what he saw in Hitler's office: 

"When I opened the door of his room, I found a scene I will never forget.. To the left of the couch was Hitler, sitting dead beside her, also dead, Eva Braun. In the right temple of Hitler I could observe a wound the size of a small coin and on his cheek ran two trickles of blood. On the carpet near the sofa,  had formed a pool of blood the size of a plate. The walls and the sofa were also splattered with blood spurts. Hitler's right hand was resting on the knee with the palm facing up. The left hand hung limp. Next to the right foot of Hitler, there was a kind Walther PPK pistol caliber 7.65 mm. At the side of the left foot, one of the same model, but a 6.35mm caliber. Hitler wore his gray military uniform  and wore the gold badge of the Party, the Iron Cross First Class and the Medal of the wounded in the First World War; in addition, he was wearing a white shirt with black tie, black pants, black socks and leather shoes". 

Erich Kuby, published a book in 1965, "The Russians in Berlin", in which he interviews Linge who stated that: "Hitler was always carrying a pistol...He had a special holster sewed into his trouser for the small Walther...."
 

Günsche, with whom Schreiber spoke only a short time after the regime fell, proved even more informative. Like Linge, Günsche admitted that he had never seen Hitler's dead body. He added the enigmatic comment: "Those things were all done without us." 

-- 'Persons Who Should Know Are Not Certain Hitler Died in Berlin Bunker', "Long Beach Press-Telegram", California, 10 January 1949

Such evidence is corroborated by General Helmuth Weidling, who told the Soviets on 4 January 1946: "After I was taken prisoner, I spoke to SS Gruppenführer Rattenhuber and SS Sturmbannführer Günsche, and both said they knew nothing about the details of Hitler's death".

Günsche, with whom Schreiber spoke only a short time after the regime fell, proved even more informative. Like Linge, Günsche admitted that he had never seen Hitler's dead body. He added the enigmatic comment: "Those things were all done without us."  

-- 'Persons Who Should Know Are Not Certain Hitler Died in Berlin Bunker', "Long Beach Press-Telegram", California, 10 January 1949

Such evidence is corroborated by General Helmuth Weidling, who told the Soviets on 4 January 1946: "After I was taken prisoner, I spoke to SS Gruppenführer Rattenhuber and SS Sturmbannführer Günsche, and both said they knew nothing about the details of Hitler's death."

On the basis of Schreiber's and Weidling's revelations, it can be regarded as certain that neither Günsche nor Linge, the two mainstays of the Hitler suicide legend, nor Mohnke nor Rattenhuber, had anything to do with Hitler's death or knew anything about it. It would seem appropriate to conclude that no one who knew anything for certain about what happened to Hitler has ever spoken about it publicly. Hitler's inner circle in Berlin knew nothing about what had happened to him, and the stories they told publicly after 1945 [in the case of Kempka] and since 1955 [in the cases of Linge and Günsche] have been lies. They were either writing themselves into history or, as seems more likely, under pressure from their captors to make statements to help buttress the Hitler suicide narrative. Indeed, it may well have been a condition of Linge's and Günsche's release from Soviet captivity in 1955 that they agreed to furnish such statements.

When considering the fate of Adolf Hitler, one has to realize that the overwhelming majority of people believe that he committed suicide during the last days of the Second World War. This view is supported by dozens of books written by among others, world-renowned historians. Their views and conclusions are seemingly well supported by circumstances and eye witness accounts.

Indeed, an entire library of books may be filled with eye-witness accounts and so-called proofs of Hitler's suicide. Most of the new printed works are merely rehashed Berlin Bunker testimonies, smoothed out to make a bit more sense, and hopefully convince us by their sheer size of whatever we seriously hope is true.

Just the consideration that there may be another, darker side to the story makes most people, to say it mildly, emotionally uneasy. Just the thought that such a man responsible for the murder of millions, might have escaped unscathed from the rubble of Berlin in 1945 seems hard to swallow. 

Ironically, it was not the evidence provided by Russia that convinced Establishment historians that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, on 30 April 1945, as Allied forces closed in on Berlin, shortly after exchanging marriage vows with Eva Braun, but the testimony of the obsessively devoted Nazis who were also present in the Chancellery Bunker when Hitler allegedly killed himself. Here is where their futile pretence became a matter of imprudence: For they were primarily the very same historians who insisted that the body shown in the annoying Russian photos was a Doppelgänger killed by those Nazis in the Berlin Bunker who wanted to thwart Allied investigators. We are therefore expected to believe that after committing the outright murder of a double for the purpose of obstructing justice, the Nazi Bunker guests were nonetheless quite frank and honest in their eye-witness accounts of what really became of Adolf Hitler. These guests would not stop even at murder to perpetrate their Führer's cover-up. Yet the world was totally convinced of their honest integrity and humble desire to satisfy our secret wish that Hitler should not have escaped justice.

The Soviet authorities, who were the only people in a position to conduct the investigations did far more to confuse the issue than to clarify it, and what their finding actually amounted to has still not been made public. When the Soviets found the partially burned remains of a man and a woman near Hitler's Bunker, their forensic specialists concluded that these were the corpses of Hitler and Braun and that both had died from cyanide poisoning. But the discovery was kept secret – perhaps because Stalin was not completely convinced.
 

In 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower said: "We have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler's death. Many people believe that Hitler escaped from Berlin".

When President Truman asked Josef Stalin at the Potsdam conference in 1945 whether or not Hitler was dead, Stalin replied bluntly, "No".

Stalin's top army officer, Georgi Konstantinovitch Zukhov, whose troops were the ones to occupy Berlin, flatly stated after a long thorough investigation in 1945: "We have found no corpse that could be Hitler's".

The chief of the U.S. trial counsel at Nuremberg, Thomas J. Dodd, said: "No one can say he is dead".

Major General Floyd Parks, who was commanding general of the U.S. sector in Berlin, stated for publication that he had been present when Marshall Zhukov described his entrance to Berlin, and Zhukov stated he believed Hitler might have escaped.

Lt. Gen. Bedell Smith, Chief of Staff to Gen. Eisenhower in the European invasion and later Director of the CIA, stated publicly on 12 October 1945: "No human being can say conclusively that Hitler is dead."

Col. W.J. Heimlich, former Chief, United States Intelligence, at Berlin, stated for publication that he was in charge of determining what had happened to Hitler and after a thorough investigation his report was: "There was no evidence beyond that of HEARSAY to support the THEORY of Hitler's suicide".

He also stated: "On the basis of present evidence, no insurance company in America would pay a claim on Adolf Hitler".

Former Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes in his book "Frankly Speaking" [as quoted in the April 1948 "The Cross and The Flag"]: "While in Potsdam at the Conference of the Big Four, Stalin left his chair, came over and clinked his liquor glass with mine in a very friendly manner. I said to him: 'Marshal Stalin, what is your theory about the death of Hitler?' Stalin replied: "He is not dead. He escaped either to Spain or Argentina.' 

A recent TV program, called "What Really Happened to Adolf Hitler," after investigating numerous stories, ends by saying that, in spite of Glasnost and the new freedom of access to Russian files, the files on Hitler are still some of the most highly classified items of the Soviets.

In his 1995 book "The Greatest Illusion: The Death [?] of Adolf Hitler," Australian historian Fred C. McKenzie summarizes how Stalin was adamant in his conviction that Adolf Hitler still lived. In August of 1945, Stalin personally accused the British of concealing the real, living Adolf Hitler in their sector of Berlin.

Russian officials even said that they thought Hitler might have escaped from the Bunker, fuelling the doubts of the Americans, who went on to conduct an 11-year investigation into the possibility that Hitler was hiding out in the foothills of the Andes or in a remote part of Argentina.

There were witnesses to Hitler’s death and the cremation of his body, and these witnesses were interrogated.

How truthful are these witnesses?

The story of Hitler's death is one of a man who knew the end was near and was determined to not be captured alive. Supposedly while he was in his Bunker, on 30 April 1945, realizing the Russians were almost upon him, he put a automatic pistol to his head and pulled the trigger while reclining on a couch. The body was then taken outside, put in a pit and set on fire to destroy the evidence. But is this what really happened ?

One witness reported seeing a gunshot wound in Hitler's mouth, while others claimed it was near the corner of his eye, [some even hinted that Hitler's butler strangled him and forced a cyanide capsule into his mouth]. Pick a card, any card. One witness described finding the body of Hitler perched limp next to a dead Eva Braun on an elongated, upholstered sofa. But another found Hitler's corpse sitting alone near a corner, on a chair by itself. Mix and match.

Hitler's one-day marriage to Eva Braun was another sentimental enticement, orchestrated to win our naive confidence. For only a worm could marry a lovely woman, just to poison her a few hours later. 

Hitler's precipitate decision to marry Eva Braun is unlikely to have been made for a reason not connected with State protocol. The probability is that they married in haste because it was a condition of some agreement. There are a number of possibilities but the most likely case is that the Church of Rome insisted on the marriage as a precondition for its help in arranging sanctuary and later exile.

The fact that a maid admitted seeing a Hitler look-alike confined to the butler's pantry area was not considered to be of great consequence.

The most prevalent opposing opinion is that the true motive was for Hitler to escape. According to the "Washington Post", the US Office of Censorship intercepted a letter in July 1945 written from someone in Washington. Addressed to a Chicago newspaper, the letter claimed that Hitler was living in a German-owned Hacienda 450 miles from Buenos Aires. The US government gave this report enough credibility to act on it, sending a classified telegram to the American embassy in Argentina requesting help in following up the inquiry.

Was Stalin was correct in his statements to his western Allies in 1945, telling them that Hitler [and Eva Braun] were still alive?

Hitler's death, at the end of World War II, assumed to be by his own hand, remains unproven. This assumption was the result of what many conceive as a conspiracy by the Western Powers, bowing to political pressures and to fight Nazism, to come up with Hitler's suicide story. This then would explain Hitler's disappearance from Nazi Germany after Germany's defeat.

By mid-1945, the public was being asked to choose between a proliferating number of escape stories and the suicide theory. All in all, the evidence supporting Hitler's escape to Argentina is pretty flimsy. And yet, so is the evidence that Hitler died in the Bunker. It rests on testimony provided by fellow Nazis who were fanatical devotees of Hitler. As such, its not hard to imagine they might have lied to help their former Leader.

However, the public was given the impression that only the suicide theory had any evidence to support it and deserved to be taken seriously.

Hitler's chauffeur Erich Kempka evidence not only became the basis for Major Hugh-Trevor-Roper's book, "The Last Days of Hitler", it was also endorsed at Nuremberg as the sole source of reliable information concerning Hitler's demise.

The primary reason Kempka's story won such a positive reception from the Anglo–American authorities was that Kempka was the sole source of evidence that appeared to support the suicide theory.

Kempka also contradicted Soviet claims that Hitler could have escaped. In his 4 July 1945 interview record, he declared:

"[With a] statement reported to have been made by the Russian Marshall Chukov [sic] that Hitler and Eva Braun could have escaped from the Berlin area by air, I can't agree. On 30 April 1945 and two or three days previous, no one could possibly have left the inner parts of Berlin by air. There was a heavy artillery fire on all the inner parts of Berlin during those days. Neither did I hear about a plane arriving or leaving after 25 or 26 April 1945".

Unfortunately for Kempka, one of the best-attested events of the last days of the Third Reich is that of a flight piloted by General Robert Ritter von Greim and Hanna Reitsch that arrived in Berlin on the morning of 26 April. The same pair took off from Berlin in the early hours of 29/30 April.

Reitsch herself not only spoke about the two flights on numerous occasions between 1945 and her death in 1979 but also devoted a chapter to them in her autobiography "Flying Is My Life". [See Hanna Reitsch, 'The Last Journey to Berlin', in "Flying Is My Life", Putnam's Sons, New York, 1954. The Greim–Reitsch flights were not even the only flights in and out of central Berlin in this period. In her book, Reitsch refers to at least two others].

Not 36 hours before Hitler committed suicide, his favorite test pilot Hanna Reitsch  was able to land a Storch light recon airplane on the Wilhelmstrasse only a few blocks from the Reichstag. She actually managed to reach the Fuhrer bunker and begged and pleading with him that he must get away. He didn't want to leave and he said his final goodbyes to her.

Here is the fascinating part.

Upon landing the plane, it was so badly damaged from ground fire and a hard landing that it couldn't be used. But, there was a similar light aircraft parked under the Brandenburg gate....not underground  but literally on the street. She gave it full throttle down the street and didn't take any fire from an enemy that was on both sides of the street because they were so stunned that an aircraft would try something so insane. By the time they opened fire she had made it over the tree line and was gone. This was verified by German and Soviet military officials.

Despite the historical consensus that Hitler killed himself at the end of World War II there still linger unanswered questions. The biggest question still is: Did he really commit suicide?

Other important questions begging for answers are:

• If Hitler shot himself in the right temple [as is claimed], why then do the Russians exhibit, what is supposed to be Hitler's cranium, showing a bullet hole in the back of his head, an exit hole from a shot in in the mouth?
• Why did the Russians refuse to allow the Western Allies to see Hitler's presumed autopsy report?
• For what reason did two German submarines land off the coast of southern Argentina more than two months after the end of World War II in Europe?
• What was the reason for the disagreement between the Russian Military Intelligence [SMERSH] and the Russian Secret state Police [NKVD] regarding Hitler?
• For what reason did Hitler's plane land in Barcelona, Spain on 27 April 1945, three days before the alleged suicide?
• Why did Stalin tell the Western Leaders that Hitler escaped from Berlin?
• Why were there no burned wood planks on the spot where Hitler and Eva Braun were supposedly be cremated?

The fragment of skull that Russian officials claim to be from Hitler
 

The prospect that the officially sanctioned story of Hitler's suicide, based on the hurriedly written report of a former British MI 5 agent named Hugh Trevor-Roper, may not be true, and this official version of history was never accepted by the Russians. It does not hold up to the facts since it was primarily based on the willfully misleading statements of Nazi witnesses in order to mislead the Allies.

There were ten official reports [conducted by NKVD and SMERSH officials, and also by the only permitted Western official] on his suicide, none of them agreed on the same method of suicide; altering in scene, gun placement and even if a gun was even involved.

Hitler had a double. Eye witness reports state that people in the Bunker noticed a significant and immediate change in Hitler's personality several days before he apparently committed suicide. He appeared shorter [Hitler's double was 2 inches shorter and often had to wear special shoes], was despondent [drugged against his will], allowed smoking [Hitler never allowed smoking near him], and his sleep patterns changed entirely: Hitler would always work late into the night and sleep in during the morning.

The Russians first exhibited the corpse of Hitler's double, believing it to be the real thing.

The Russians later admitted they never actually found the whole corpse of Hitler or Eva Braun.

According to Ian Kershaw ["Hitler: A Biography". New York: W. W. Norton & Company] the corpses of Braun and Hitler were fully burned when the Red Army found them, and only a lower jaw with dental work could be identified as Hitler's remains.

Why did the Russians not allow the Western Allies to see the "autopsy report" of Hitler's supposed corpse?
 

Hitler's private plane landed in neutral [or loosely German-allied] Barcelona, Spain, on 27 April 1945, three days before the alleged suicide. Two months later, three German submarines surfaced and landed off the cost of South Argentina - a hot spot for hiding Nazi war criminals [Mengele, Eichmann etc.] timeframe all coincide perfectly with that required to travel from Berlin.

Stalin was adamant, and told President Truman and his military Generals and the NKVD and SMERSH, that he believed Hitler had escaped, until the time of his death.

The Propaganda machines of WWII would have been in their full swing at this point in the war. The Soviet Army would have been desperate to say that Hitler was dead, and that he took the coward's way out. What country of those times, after such a devastating war, would want to publicly admit he'd slipped through the cracks? That the most despised person in the twentieth century had escaped?
 

When the Soviets entered the Bunker, Russian leader, Josef Stalin immediately asked for a report on the whereabouts of Adolf Hitler. The first news he received from his generals was definite: the most wanted man had escaped. Stalin informed the United States in the exact same words. This striking piece of first-hand information is even more shocking when the Soviets state that Hitler had fled to Spain or in a submarine bound for  Argentina. Everything stated here has been documented, it was even published by newspapers of that time, and whoever wants to question Hitler’s escape must first of all know the facts about the official history, hidden by official misinformation.

"Shortly after his arrival, on 17 July 1945, Stalin came to call on the President. We had to remember to call him Generalissimo rather than Marshal Stalin, for he had been accorded the new title in recognition of the Red Army's great successes. It was the first time the President and Stalin had met. After a very pleasant conversation, the President quite informally asked Stalin, Molotov, and Pavlov, the capable Soviet interpreter, to stay and have lunch with him. They accepted.

The conversation was general in nature and cordial in spirit. The President was favorably impressed by Stalin, as I had been at Yalta.

In speaking of our visit to Berlin, I asked the Generalissimo his views of how Hitler had died. To my surprise, he said he believed that Hitler was alive and that it was possible he was then either in Spain or Argentina. Some ten days later I asked him if he had changed his views and he said he had not".

-- Byrnes, James F. "Speaking Frankly". "Harper & Brothers, New York, 1947

Given that the evidence from other sources is abundant enough to establish that they actually took place, there is something extremely suspicious about Kempka's assertion that no such flights would have been possible.

There is no reason to jump to the conclusion, however tempting, that Kempka must have lied about being in the Chancellery during the regime's final days. He could have been temporarily absent from the Bunker on a mission. If so, he had returned by the afternoon of 30 April. Several eyewitnesses have provided evidence establishing Kempka's presence at a cremation held in the Chancellery garden at around 3.00 pm that afternoon. SS Hauptsturmführer Karl Schneider acknowledged speaking to Kempka at the Chancellery garage on the evening of 1 May. He told the Soviets on 19 May 1945 that on this occasion Kempka had told him that Hitler was "allegedly dead".

The explanation that best accounts for events, therefore, is that Kempka sought to suppress his knowledge of the two flights. When Kempka first gave his story to the Americans in June 1945, he had no reason to believe that they knew anything at all about them. There is a very good reason why Kempka would not have wanted to mention these flights: the cover story—that Greim flew to Berlin to receive instructions from Hitler, who had just made him the new head of the Luftwaffe—is preposterous. Why would Hitler, who was anxious for everyone else to leave Berlin, want someone to come to him? Why would he have been so keen to talk to the head of an almost nonexistent entity? The official story fails to justify Greim and Reitsch's extremely dangerous flight. It also does not explain why the pair's flight from the Luftwaffe air base at Rechlin near Berlin to Gatow airport on Berlin's periphery was accompanied by an escort of 30–40 fighter jets—in other words, the extant Luftwaffe virtually in its entirety. Clearly, the flight had a more serious purpose than we have been led to believe.

Carter P. Hydrick, "Critical Mass: The Real Story of the Birth of the Atomic Bomb and the Nuclear Age", 1998, believes that Greim and Reitsch ferried Martin Bormann out of Berlin. 

However, in a striking passage in his memoirs, former Volkssturm member Dieter H. B. Protsch relates an incident that took place in Berlin on 29 April 1945. That day, which happened to be his thirteenth birthday, in the course of searching for food for his family he stumbled upon a basement occupied by several Waffen-SS men operating radio equipment who gave him bread and chocolate:

"After some small talk about the family, they suddenly stopped talking when the radio operator raised his hand to demand quiet. The 'Funker' [Radio Operator], wearing a head set, started smiling and stated that "der Führer" got his belated birthday present. He explained further that he [Hitler] made it safely out of Berlin, flown out by his personal pilot Hanna Reitsch, Germany's best female test pilot. The report stated that she was flying a small one engine, two or three seater plane, a so-called 'Fiseler [sic] Storch'.

--  Dieter H. B. Protsch, "Be All You Can Be: From a Hitler Youth in WWII to a US Army Green Beret", Trafford Publishing, 2004 

Thus the truth seems to be that, exactly as the Soviets subsequently alleged, Hitler did indeed make it out of Berlin — more or less around the time that the official story tells us that he was still in the Bunker dictating his Political Testament—and that Erich Kempka knew precisely when and how this had taken place, but withheld the information from the Americans.

According to Reitsch, the flight reached Rechlin at about 3.00 am. Here, she states, Greim attended a conference. Then she and Greim flew—apparently using a different aircraft—to Plön, a distance of some 400 miles. Their next destinations were Dobbin, where Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was [Keitel confirms in his memoirs, that he was at Dobbin this day, thus confirming Reitsch's reliability. He adds the striking information, which Reitsch does not mention, that Himmler was at Dobbin, too. ["In The Service Of The Reich: The Memoirs of Field Marshal Keitel", ed. Walter Goerlitz, Focal Point Publications, London, 2003] Lübeck, Plön again ["to see Dönitz"], and finally Königgrätz (in Bohemia, now Hradec Králové in the Czech Republic].

--  Hanna Reitsch, "Flying Is My Life" 

If we assume,  that Hitler was present during at least the first of these several stages, we can say that at Rechlin the trail goes cold. If Hitler left Berlin with Greim and Reitsch, then that would account for the series of bizarre events—the marriage to Eva Braun, the writing of the Political Testament, the recurring rages—that have been enshrined in official history as "the Last Days of the Third Reich".

Obviously, Hitler's last days in the Bunker needed to be accounted for, and so a lurid series of episodes had to be invented to fill in the yawning gap.

Hitler, Stalin, and "Operation Myth"
Source: CIA Article

An exhibit titled "The Agony of the Third Reich: Retribution," which opened last April at the Russian State Archives in Moscow, celebrates the 55th anniversary of the Red Army's capture of Berlin and victory over Nazi Germany. On display are such trophies as Adolf Hitler's and Josef Göbbels' personal papers, Martin Bormann's diary, the surrender agreement ending the Soviet-German war, several of the Führer's uniforms, and a blood-stained section of the sofa where Hitler shot himself after swallowing a cyanide ampoule. The artifacts are from the State Archives as well as the holdings of the Foreign Ministry and the Russian Federal Security Service [FSB].

Hitler's Skull?

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a fragment of a human skull measuring about 3 x 4 inches, approximately the size of a hand. The fragment has jagged edges and a bullet hole on one side. It is one of four such fragments that a Red Army soldier found in a bomb crater turned into a makeshift grave in the garden of Hitler's Reichskanzelei (Imperial Chancellery) in Berlin. Russia's chief archivist says he is "99.9 percent" certain the fragment was once part of Adolf Hitler's cranium.

The Russian curators apparently do not lack a sense of irony. One of the displays is an interrogation report from an SS officer who served as Hitler's adjutant. In it, the SS man claims that Hitler ordered him to burn his mortal remains because he did not want to end up on display in the Soviet Union. So in a way the Russians had the last laugh, thwarting what may have been the Führer's final order.

Lord Dacre, better known as former Oxford professor Hugh Trevor-Roper and the author of "Hitler's Last Days", called the exhibit "sordid." Macabre might be a better word. Ostensibly, it celebrates Russia's VE Day, which falls on 9 May, the official opening date. But the actual opening date, 30 April, was--not by coincidence--the anniversary of Hitler's suicide in the Führerbunker located beneath the garden of the bombed-out Reichskanzelei, once the seat of the Nazi government. By exhibiting the skull fragments and other Hitler memorabilia, the Russians are in effect finally exorcising the Führer's ghost and closing the books on one of the most bizarre Soviet intelligence operations of the Cold War--Operatsiya Mif [Operation Myth].

The Hitler Myth

The Soviet government kept the Hitler file completely secret until 1968, when it revealed some of the truth--along with some deliberate distortions--in the West but not in the USSR. That was the year in which a journalist named Lev Bezymensky published the results of the official Soviet investigation into Hitler's death and two autopsies performed on the Nazi leader's remains. The book appeared in English in the United States and Britain, but not in Russian and not in the USSR. In 1993, the Yeltsin government granted access to the KGB's Mif files and released photographs of the skull fragments to a Russian and a British journalist. But their book also was published only in English and only in the United States and Britain. Now, thanks to the Moscow exhibit, foreigners will be able to examine artifacts that they may have heard about but were never allowed to see, while Russians will see for the first time objects and documents that they never knew existed.

By late March 1945, the Red Army had encircled Berlin and begun its final assault with a massive artillery shelling. The Germans' strong resistance, however, forced the Soviets to fight block by block and house by house before they raised the hammer-and-sickle ensign over the Reichstag. Stalin dispatched special "Trophy Brigades," organized by Smersh [military counterintelligence], to search for art and other valuables, official records and archives, and anything else of exceptional material and intelligence value. But the most prized trophy was Hitler himself, and selected Smershisti received extensive briefings on how to locate and identify the Führer. On 4 May, a unit attached to the 79th Rifle Corps of the Third Shock Army and under the command of Lt. Col. Ivan Klimenko discovered the badly charred remains of 11 humans and two animals [Hitler's dogs] in shallow graves--actually bomb craters--a few meters away from the entrance to the bunker, where Hitler and his entourage had taken refuge since March.

The badly burned bodies were taken to a clinic commandeered as a makeshift morgue in the north Berlin suburb of Buch, where a four-man military medical team headed by a physician with the improbable name of Dr. Faust Shkravaski concluded that Hitler's remains were among those found near the bunker. Shkravaski did not have much to work with, but there was enough left of Hitler's teeth, lower jaw, and dental work to make a positive identification. Odontological evidence collected from the office of Hitler's dentist, the dentist's assistant, and a dental technician who had made bridgework for the Führer formed the basis of the evidence. By 9 May, when the autopsies were completed, the Soviets knew that Hitler was dead.

Stalin and Operation Myth

But the one man whose opinion mattered the most--Josef Stalin--refused to accept the findings recorded in Shkravaski's forensic report. He dispatched his secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, to Berlin to review the autopsy results and associated evidence and bring everything back to Moscow. [For reasons that remain unclear, however, Smersh had already removed and reburied the human and canine corpses that Shkravaski's team had examined, and refused to dig them up and turn them over to the secret police]. Stalin rejected the autopsy's conclusions out of hand.

Then, on 26 May, during a Kremlin meeting with President Roosevelt's chief adviser Harry Hopkins, and diplomats Averell Harriman and Charles [Chip] Bohlen, Stalin said that he believed Hitler had escaped from Berlin and was hiding in the West.

Stalin was not making diplomatic small talk; he was launching a disinformation campaign that he had personally devised and directed.

The next version of this myth appeared in the 7 May 1945 edition of "Time", which featured Hitler's portrait on its cover with a large cross through it.

According to a certain "Pvt. Ivan Nikitin," a German SS officer had revealed under interrogation that he had heard Hitler ranting and raving about a coming conflict between the USSR and its western Allies once the war had concluded. [Hitler, in fact, anticipated the Cold War in a document known as "My Political Testament"].

But, "Nikitin" claimed, Hitler said that as long as he was still alive the wartime alliance would remain intact. The world would have to be convinced that he was dead. Once the former allies found themselves in conflict, he would reappear and lead the German people to their final victory over Bolshevism.

The same "Nikitin" claimed that behind an armoire in the Bunker was a moveable concrete wall with a man-size hole in it. On the other side of the wall was a passageway leading to a tunnel where an army troop train was waiting to take Hitler and his entourage to safety.

Although the artist depicted Hitler's eyes as brown, they were blue

During the month of May 1945 after Germany had surrendered, Russian criminologists, guided by Major Ivan Nikitine, chief of Stalin´s security police, reconstructed Hitler's last days in Berlin.

In the 28 May 1945 edition of "Time", which featured Hitler's portrait on its cover with a large cross through it, Nikitine stated:

"A removable concrete plaque was found next to a bookshelf in Hitler´s personal quarters. Behind it there was a man size tunnel which led to a super secret cement refuge 500 metres away. Another tunnel connected it with a tunnel belonging to a line of the underground/tube. Remains of food indicated that there had been between 6 and 12 people there until 9 May 1945".

The "Goulburn Evening Post" [NSW] on 19 June 1951 stated:

"Three weeks after the collapse of Nazi Germany, Major Ivan Nikitine, deputy chief of the Soviet Security Police, reported in Berlin that the Führer had neither shot himself nor been cremated, as generally believed, if indeed, he had perished at all".

Nikitine had interrogated many of the captured Bunker survivors. Under cross-examination, Germans who had told of Hitler's death “twisted their stories, clashed in detail", and finally admitted that no one had seen the Führer die.

Next, Stalin dispatched Andrei Vyshinsky, the notorious prosecutor in the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s, to Berlin to brief Marshal Georgy Zhukov on the new line on Hitler. [Zhukov said on record that he believed Hitler was dead]. The Soviet marshal was at the height of his fame and popularity, and had been called the greatest Russian commander since Suvorov. For Stalin, who feared and usually eliminated potential rivals, it was time to cut him down to size.

At a 9 June press conference--the first since the Western press had been allowed into the Soviet-controlled city--Zhukov, with Vyshinsky at his side, offered a new version of Hitler's fate. The Führer's "present whereabouts are unknown," he said. Zhukov denied reports circulating in Berlin that the Soviets had found a corpse that "could be Hitler's." He added that: "Based on personal and official information, we can only say that Hitler had a chance to get away with his bride [Eva Braun, who married the Führer hours before they committed suicide]. Hitler could have flown out at the very last minute". Zhukov's "personal view" was that Hitler had taken refuge in Spain.

The new Soviet version went out over the press wires the next day, providing grist for hundreds if not thousands of Hitler sightings for many years to come. Vyshinsky then accompanied Zhukov to Frankfurt, where the marshal briefed Gen. Eisenhower on the new Soviet line. Eisenhower later told the press that he had changed his mind about Hitler and believed the Nazi dictator might still be alive.

In July Stalin acted again. At the Big Three summit in Potsdam, Germany, Stalin told US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes that he believed Hitler was living in Spain or Argentina. He repeated this in the presence of Adm. William D. Leahy, President Truman's military adviser. On other occasions, Stalin speculated that Hitler had made his way to Hamburg and left Germany for Japan on board a U-boat; or that he was hiding in Germany in the British occupation zone.

Operation Myth was officially launched in December 1945. Its mission was threefold: To (1) gather and review all records and forensic evidence collected during May-June 1945; (2) check and recheck interrogation reports from Hitler's Bunker entourage; and (3) reconcile or explain inconsistencies and contradictions in the evidence. A commission chaired by the USSR's preeminent criminologist, Dr. Pytor Semenovsky, and controlled from behind the scenes by Beria, began by tearing up Shkravaski's autopsy and rejecting the evidence on which it was based. This gives some idea of what the commission's unstated purpose was: to produce a report that confirmed or at least was compatible with Stalin's belief that Hitler was--or at least might be--still alive. After reexamining all the evidence, the Semenovsky commission concluded it was "not...possible to arrive at a final conclusion" regarding Hitler. That may have been less decisive than Stalin wanted, but apparently it was as far as the scientists believed they could go in stretching the truth to please Stalin.

Above all, the brutal interrogation of witnesses demonstrated how obsessed Stalin was with finding proof that Hitler might be alive. Smersh detained some 800 [!] persons, and 21 of 35 key witnesses were arrested and interrogated in Berlin and Moscow--often repeatedly and brutally. Some of the witnesses were imprisoned for 10 years or more on trumped up war crimes charges. The Soviets went to great lengths to locate Hitler's relatives. They even arrested his half-sister, a simple Austrian peasant woman whom Hitler had last seen in 1907, as well as her husband and a half-brother Hitler had never even laid eyes on. The focus of the endless interrogations, which filled tens of thousands of pages, was to prove that Hitler could have survived and that the people he spent his last days with had engaged in a systematic deception to convince the world otherwise.

The Smershisti tried to beat confessions out of their prisoners. Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, was stripped, tied down, and then beaten with whips as his German-speaking interrogators shouted: "Hitler is alive! Hitler is alive!" Two other key witnesses, Hitler's SS adjutant Otto Günsche, and the Führer's personal pilot, Hans Baur, reported similar experiences after returning home in 1956. In Baur's case, interrogators spent hours trying to force him to admit that it had been possible for Hitler to fly out of the Berlin inferno. Witnesses were forced to write and rewrite their accounts of the final days in the Bunker. The Soviets even partially reconstructed the Bunker and, using mannequins, had witnesses reenact Hitler's and Eva Braun's suicides. Tables and charts were used to plot testimonies against one another in an effort to identify inconsistencies as well as corroborating information.

Imprisoning Hitler's entourage was not aimed so much at uncovering the truth as concealing it. Other steps were taken in the same direction. Stalin ordered that the human and animal remains found in Berlin be hidden. [Strangely, he did not demand their return to Moscow, where they presumably would have been of value to Semenovsky's team]. The Smershisti buried the remains first in Rathenow, then in Stendal. In February 1946, in Magdeburg, the remains were finally buried in the courtyard of an apartment house commandeered by the Red Army. There they remained until April 1970, when KGB chief Yuri Andropov, with Politburo approval, ordered Meropriyatiya Arkhiv [Measure or Operation Archive]. Under the guise of searching for long-lost Nazi records, a KGB team excavated what was by then a garage on a Soviet military base and removed the remains of nine persons, including Hitler and Eva Braun. [The base was about to be turned over to the East German government]. The remains, now a "jellied mass" according to a KGB report, were pulverized, soaked in gasoline, and then completely burned up. The ashes were mixed with coal particles and then taken 11 kilometers north of Magdeburg, where they were dumped into the Bideriz, a tributary of the Elbe river.

Why did Stalin go to such lengths to deceive the West while trying to convince himself that Hitler could still be alive? The short answer is: no one knows. Some historians believe that the Soviet dictator wanted to send Western intelligence services on a never-ending wild-goose chase. Whether that was his purpose or not, that in fact is what happened. For 30 years the FBI investigated every report it received regarding Hitler sightings or claims that the Führer was still alive. [A 734-page file of such reports is available on the Internet]. The Bureau conducted its own 11-year probe into the possibility that Hitler had escaped and was still alive. Other historians maintain that Stalin manipulated the Hitler myth to put the onus on the West for "hiding" the German dictator and protecting Nazi war criminals or that he wanted to use rumors that Hitler was in Spain to settle an old score with Franco and avenge the Communist defeat in the Spanish Civil War.

Some historians have focused on the Hitler myth to question whether Stalin was rational. A clever, cunning, and malicious Stalin might have misled and lied to his top aides and wartime allies for some inexplicable political or psychological purpose and still have been rational. But the fantastic effort carried out under the rubric of Myth suggests something else--that Stalin was trying to bend the evidence to conform to his own distorted version of reality. Here Stalin was not attempting to mislead someone else but was trying to prove his own delusion--or at least destroy the evidence that contradicted it.

Otto Günsche
Hitler’s SS Adjutant

Heinz Linge
Hitler's SS Valet

None of this would have occurred if there had been a corpus delecti. Or would it have? Even with a corpse in better condition at hand, would Stalin have buried and reburied the body, as he did the remains, to cover up the evidence of Hitler's death?

What about the skull fragments? The first autopsy noted that a piece of the cranium was missing. In early 1946, a SMERSH unit sent to search the area where Hitler's remains had been found discovered the fragments, and apparently they fit the skull that had been examined in Buch. We do not know when or how the skull fragments reached Moscow. We do know that they were stored in the NKVD/KGB/FBS archives and that their existence was not revealed until 1995--and then only in the West, and not in Russia until this past April! Today, just as in 1945, the skull fragments may hold the final answer. Genetic testing should be able to determine once and for all whether they are the missing pieces of Hitler's cranium. Some of Hitler's closest relatives disappeared into Stalin's Gulag, but others, including several of his closest relatives living in the United States, survived. The Russian government, however, cannot afford expensive test procedures; although it is willing to let someone else pick up the tab. So far, no one has offered to do so. In the final analysis, this lack of interest in Hitler and the end of the Third Reich, while disappointing to historians, may not be a bad thing.

Benjamin Fischer,
CIA History Staff

The Day of Hitler's Death: Even Now, New Glimpses
Stephen Kinzer
New York Times  
4 May 1995

BERLIN, May 3—  Fifty years ago this week, with his "thousand-year Reich" in ruins, Hitler committed suicide, ending a life that may have brought more suffering to more people than any other in history.

Because no clearly identifiable corpse was known to have been found, uncertainty about Hitler's fate persisted for years. But in recent weeks, new information has emerged that not only proves conclusively that the Nazi dictator killed himself in his underground Bunker, but also illuminates details of the hours immediately before and after his death as well as the way the Soviets disposed of his remains a quarter-century later.

On 28 April 1945 Hitler received news that Mussolini had been captured by Partisans, shot and hanged upside-down in a Milan plaza. Determined to cheat his enemies, Hitler resolved to commit suicide, and ordered aides to burn his body beyond recognition afterward.

"My Führer, why don't you go to the troops as a soldier?" his secretary, Traudl Junge, asked him.

"I can't do that," Hitler replied. "None of my people are prepared to shoot me, and I won't fall into the Russians' hands alive."

Hitler awoke early on the morning of 30 April and spoke with his private pilot, Hans Baur, who reported that he had prepared a plane capable of making a long-distance flight. He suggested that Hitler flee to Argentina, Japan, Greenland, Manchuria or Jerusalem, where admirers were supposedly ready to spirit him to a hideout in the Sahara.

Hitler declined the offer, and a few hours later dictated his final testament to Miss Junge.

"During these last three decades, all my thoughts and actions, and my entire life, have been moved solely by the love and fidelity I feel for my people," he said. "This has given me the strength to make the most difficult of decisions, the like of which no mortal has ever made before."

After finishing his dictation, Hitler and his wife of two days, Eva Braun, retired to their sitting room. At 3:30, a shot rang out. Artur Axmann, a Hitler Youth leader, entered the room moments later.

"Adolf Hitler sat on the right side of the sofa," Mr. Axmann recalled in one of several interviews he has given in recent weeks. "His upper body was leaning slightly to the side, with the head slumping down. His forehead and face were very white, and a trickle of blood was flowing down.

"I saw Eva Braun next to Hitler on the sofa. Her eyes were closed. There was no movement. She had poisoned herself, and appeared to be sleeping".

Aides took the two bodies outside, doused them with gasoline and burned them, continuing until they had used about 50 gallons.

In recent interviews, retired Soviet Intelligence officers have confirmed what they refused to confirm for years: that they found and identified Hitler's remains. One officer, Gen. Leonid Siomonchuk, who later rose to the rank of general in the K.G.B., told German interviewers that he was present when Hitler's dentist was ordered to examine the corpse.

"At the beginning he was a bit shocked, unable to speak," General Siomonchuk recalled. "Then he said, 'Hitler is dead.'

A document newly obtained from long-closed archives in Moscow includes an order that Hitler's remains be burned and that the ashes be dumped in the Elbe River.

A part of what may be Hitler's skull, with bullet hole, was removed before the cremation and shipped to Moscow. Before German television cameras, a Russian archivist, Alzha Borkovich, recently unwrapped it and held it in her hand.

"To tell you the truth," she said, "my hand is shaking".

Adolf Hitler "did not shoot himself"
Russia's top KGB archivist has claimed Adolf Hitler poisoned himself rather than committing suicide with a gun in the manner of a "soldier"
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow
Telegraph, UK
7 May 2010

If accurate, Lt-General Khristoforov's account casts doubt on the widely accepted version of how Hitler died

He said the "myth" that Hitler died an honourable death by simultaneously shooting himself in the head as he took a cyanide capsule appeared wide of the mark.        

"The presence of the remains of crushed glass capsules in the mouth and the sharp odour of bitter almonds from the corpses, and the results of an internal post-mortem led the [Soviet] commission to conclude that it was death by cyanide poisoning," he said.

"Thus the myth put about by those Nazis left in Berlin that 'the Führer died like a soldier having shot himself in his Bunker' was shattered".

Soviet medics found no serious wounds on Hitler's heavily burned body either, he added.

If accurate, Lt-General Khristoforov's account casts doubt on the widely accepted version of how Hitler died. It also raises questions over the authenticity of a skull fragment kept in Russia's state archive that purportedly belonged to Hitler.

The fragment has a bullet hole in it yet American researchers claim that DNA testing of the skull has shown it belonged to a woman aged from 20 to 40 and could not be Hitler's.

The Russians have defended the skull's authenticity but have not offered their own DNA proof and this latest pronouncement appears to reinforce the idea that the skull is not Hitler's.

The lastest research indicates Hitler didn't kill himself at all. Even Stalin and Eisenhower knew this. The historical picture of a "dead" Hitler surrounded by Russian soldiers has been proven to be a Hitler double. The so-call Hitler skull the Russians held was discovered to be that of a woman. A recent study also shows that not only did no one witness his suicide, but no one could hear it inside a fortified Bunker with an air circulator running. It's likely that Hitler was flown out of Berlin to parts unknown.

***

This article is very curious. The KGB claims don't make sense... If they tested Hitlers badly burned corpse then why do they only have a skull fragment left? And a woman's skull fragment at that.  

The tyranical KGB's police state records, lied for decades about the Katyn Massacre of 22,000 Polish Officers - they blamed it on the Nazis!

Hitler’s Jaws of Death
By Antony Beevor
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
10 October 2009 

The assertion by American researchers that Hitler might have escaped from Berlin because a skull fragment in a Moscow archive was not his but a young woman’s is rich in paradox. Stalin went to great lengths in 1945 to conceal the fact that Hitler’s body had been identified by pathologists working for Smersh, the Soviet military counterintelligence agency. Stalin even misled his own commander in chief, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, demanding to know why he had failed to find Hitler’s corpse. And "Pravda" declared that rumors of the discovery of Hitler’s body were a fascist provocation.

Stalin ruled by creating fear and uncertainty among both subordinates at home and among his Western allies abroad, who were of course seen as potential enemies. Even after Hitler’s jaws, with their distinctive bridgework, had been identified by the assistant to the Führer’s personal dentist, the Soviet authorities nurtured rumors that Hitler was hiding in Bavaria. As Bavaria was part of the American zone of occupation, the implication was that the Americans had concealed him and were somehow in league with the Nazis. Now, 64 years later, an episode of the History Channel series “MysteryQuest” — with the outrageous title of 'Hitler’s Escape' — has distorted the revelation of the skull to scare up a similar fugitive ghost, to the furious exasperation of the Russian authorities.

On 2 May 1945, members of the SMERSH detachment of the Soviet Third Shock Army, having heard of Hitler’s suicide two days earlier, sealed off the Reich Chancellery garden and Hitler’s Bunker there as they searched for the body. All those on the SMERSH team were sworn to secrecy and warned that any mention of their work would be treated as treason. Even Marshal Zhukov was refused entry to the Bunker during the search on the ground that “it wasn’t safe down there".

All members of Hitler’s household who had been identified were held in the Reich Institute for the Blind, on the Oranienstrasse. One after another they were interrogated by a Major known to history only as Bystrov. Stalin was so desperate for news that a general from the N.K.V.D., the K.G.B.’s predecessor, was sent to supervise the interrogations. He was given a secure line with a scrambler so that he could report back to Moscow after each interview.

On 5 May Smersh operatives finally discovered Hitler’s body along with that of Eva Braun in the chancellery garden; the two corpses had been doused in gasoline and set on fire by SS aides, in accordance with Hitler’s orders, and then buried in a shell crater. The Soviets smuggled the remains to an improvised morgue in Buch, a suburb of Berlin. Hitler’s body was too badly burned to be recognizable, so the jaws were removed since they offered the best means of identification. The assistant to Hitler’s dentist was tracked down and brought to examine them.

Yelena Rzhevskaya, the interpreter with the SMERSH group, later recounted how on the evening of 8 May, when Soviet troops prepared to celebrate the German surrender, she was given a box covered in red satin and told to guard it with her life. She described it as “the sort used for cheap jewelry". The box held Hitler’s jaws. Rzhevskaya was given it because, as a woman, she was considered less likely to get drunk that night and lose it.

The skull and the jaws are still separate because Smersh hung on to its precious evidence. The cranium, recovered later, allegedly at the same site, was taken by the N.K.V.D., and that is why it has been in the State Archive of the Russian Federation since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The jaws are almost certainly still held in the Lubyanka, the Moscow headquarters of the Russian secret police, along with other prizes retrieved by Smersh from the garden, like Hitler’s Nazi party badge, which was taken from the body of Magda Göbbels.

Although we have been subjected over the last few months to a barrage of disinformation from the Russians about the start of World War II — including attempts to blame the Poles and the British for its outbreak — I would tend to believe their version in the case of its ending. Even if the cranium is not Hitler’s but some unknown woman’s, the jaws are almost certainly genuine. The Russians could end speculation and ridiculous conspiracy theories by allowing an international team to carry out DNA tests on them.

In any case, Stalin was obsessed with every detail about his archenemy Hitler, whom he both feared and admired in a distorted way. The investigations of his death were meticulous, as the Smersh reports show. Witnesses to the suicide and the burning of the bodies were interviewed again and again by Smersh and the N.K.V.D., and some by the British — in fact, by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who wrote "The Last Days of Hitler".

There were no major discrepancies in any of the accounts, so suggestions that Hitler did not commit suicide and had escaped from Berlin represent nothing but gratuitous sensationalism. It is just another attempt to exploit the nightmare conspiracy theory that the source of unparalleled evil lived on somewhere, in secret?

Antony Beevor is the author of "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy" and "The Fall of Berlin 1945"
A version of this op-ed appears in print on 11 October 11, 2009, on page WK11 of the "New York Times" edition with the headline: 'Hitler’s Jaws of Death'

Beevor's official anti-"conspiracy theory" version is convoluted and hysterical. Indeed, it is itself a "conspiracy theory" to explain away a very simple fact: the supposed skull of Hitler is actually a woman's.

As for the "jaw bone" it is unclear as to if it is an actual bone or not. Bridgework has been shown in photos, but no jaw bone as such. If it is bridgework then that could be anyones whereas a bone can be tested for DNA through Hitler's relatives.

It is entirely possible that Hitler did die in Nazi Germany. However, it is then not unreasonable to ask those who claim that he did perish in Berlin to provide proper forensic evidence to support their argument.

A woman's skull just doesn't cut it.....
 

Death of Hitler
By: Alexandre Bilodeau 

The Hitler Conspiracy....

During the spring of 1945, the German army was retreating from the European battlefield. The Allies, aided by British general Montgomery and American general George S. Patton, were pushing the German army back from the western occupied zones. The Russian Red Army was pushing the Germans back from the eastern occupied zone. It was now clear that Germany had lost the war and many of its soldiers were surrendering to the Allies.

Although the Allied forces' chief general Dwight D. Eisenhower was American, the Russians were given the affirmation to proceed and secure Berlin. 30 April 1945, Berlin is under heavy fire. Russian troops are blocks away from the Führer's Chancellery Bunker, an underground fortress. As fleeing German officials and Generals made their way through the ruins that was once a proud city, Russian infantrymen penetrated the city. After they secured the Chancellery Bunker, their goal was to bring the ultimate war trophy home to their leaders, Adolf Hitler. But nothing is found. Only remains that brought uncertainty and uneasiness to an otherwise successful Allied victory are suspected to be Hitler. The truth about Hitler's death intrigued the world since no official verdict or explanation can be offered.

What actually became of Hitler's body? Several theories were spread throughout 1945, after Germany's surrender, that he Soviets' found Hitler and Eva Braun's body remains after what would be thought of  as a suicide and burning. Other theories indicated that Hitler escaped Berlin. Hitler's body was not found since it was semi-cremated, falsely identified and it presented no physical evidence that could be analysed.

It was discovered not to long ago that the Soviets conducted, a year after the war, one of the most profound and thorough investigation of Hitler's death. "Operation Myth" was conducted secretly and all the findings were hidden. In the investigation, four key characters such as Hitler's valet, bodyguard, pilot and telephonist were interrogated due to their presence during the last days of Hitler's life. One of them was Otto Günsche. "Anyway, the Russians were never in a position to display the remains of Hitler's corpse, as they certainly would have done if they had taken it away as they claimed" says Otto Günsche, Hitler's personal adjutant who set his body on fire. The information the four men gave led the Russians to discover a skull with a bullet hole in it. The skull fragment was preserved but it was judged to be a long shot and never really took off. Therefore, it is most unlikely that the Russians ever found Hitler's body, as they claimed for several weeks after his death.

The Red Army initially found the body that looked like Hitler but was in fact the corpse of Gustav Weler, Hitler's "Doppelgänger" or body look alike. This corpse had a gun shot wound to the forehead. This discovery was a confusing step in the investigation as it drew a lot of controversy. But instead of celebrating prematurely, the Russians kept this discovery quiet and pursued with more interrogating. After having interrogated and tortured more captured German staff, the Soviet counter intelligence unit found the buried remains of two corpses outside the Chancellery Bunker in the garden. The corpses were taken to a pathology lab for an autopsy. There five Soviet forensic scientists examined both corpses. They found that the male body had died of cyanide poisoning - which contradicts the theory that the captured German officers told them that Hitler shot himself through the right temple. Following these discoveries, Stalin announced that Hitler had not been found and had possibly escaped Berlin. The fact that Hitler's body had not been found created a series of beliefs that the Führer had actually escaped and fled the ruined city.

Stalin had announced to Truman during lunch in Potsdam on 17 July 1945, 78 days after his death, that Hitler had escaped. From this announcement began the phenomenon of Hitler spotting across the world. Most notably in South America. Again nothing emerged from this and no substantial evidence was delivered, thus rendering this phenomenon a wild ghost chase. Many post war magazines featured articles on Hitler still alive and hiding. Magazines such as "The Plain Truth" proposed that Hitler might be in the South Pole. CBC's "As it Happens" broadcasted that Hitler ordered a special plane to convey all X-rays and dental records of top brass Nazis for an unknown destination. South American newspapers that have claimed to have seen him 10 years after the war ended. More and more of these articles appeared in all sorts of publications, radio and TV broadcasts around the world. But none of these allocations were built with solid evidence. They were rather wild testimonies of post war fanatics who say and hear all sorts of things to stir suspicion. No follow-ups of these were ever conducted. The only people interrogated were the men and women who were with Hitler in his last days and they gave their testimonies. Almost all captured German officers that were with Hitler during his last hour told their Russian captors that he shot himself in the right temple with a pistol and was subsequently taken outside to the garden and cremated with gasoline in the open air then buried in a shelling crater.

During a cremation in a crematorium, the heat that is reflected off the walls is so intense, that all organic matter is destroyed. But in an open air fire, much of this heat is lost therefore rendering the destruction less powerful in a crematorium. "People have said that human bodies can't be entirely consumed by fire in the open air - Baur himself, who had seen corpses burning in an aeroplane, thought not - and that a proper cremation installation is needed if there are to be no remains." Baur was Hitler's pilot. When all bodily tissues and fluids are burned away, the only thing that remains is fragile calcified bones. As a result, it is very unlikely that anything resembling a human corpse remained following Hitler's burning. Nothing that the scientific knowledge in that period could identify and prove it to be Hitler's.

Now investigators had to rely on information sources such as Harry Mengerhausen. The only person who claimed to have seen Hitler's corpse is Harry Mengershausen, a captured German who was released some time after the war. He recalled the place where the remains were buried in the garden of the Chancellory Bunker. But the garden was an immense field of craters. Mr. Mengershausen spoke of a specific crater among all of the craters. Indication of a lie is obvious here. Later on, Mr. Mengerhausen said he was brought from his prison to an open pit in the woods to identify three corpses. The corpses had been identified as those of Hitler and Herr and Frau Göbbels. Mr Mengerhausen claims to have clearly recognized Hitler by the shape of the head, the distinctive shape of the nose and the missing feet. It is impossible that Mengershausen was able to detect the distinctive shape of the nose since it has burned like all the soft tissues of the body.

Once again, Mengershausen is telling a story in great detail as usual that simply does not fit the circumstances . Also it is now known fact that the Göbbels was partially burnt outside the Bunker. Their bodies were identifiable and were displayed by the Soviets and photos are available. This recognizing of the bodies was a totally unscientific procedure. Therefore, Mr. Mengerhausen's testimony to the Russians is an obvious misleading statement and unreliable source.

Following the interrogation of the captured officers, a line of doctors and physicians that worked on Hitler was brought in to answer questions. The questions were relating to Hitler's physical traits and distinctive features. However, none of them actually examined any physical evidence. None were given any corpses or bone fragments to examine. For example, a dentist that worked on Hitler's teeth was brought in to draw by memory a diagram of Hitler's teeth. Apparently the drawing matched that of the sample they found. It would have seemed unlikely that a dentist could have remembered the structure of a man's teeth without consulting some form of documentation or evidence. Memory itself is a crude method of fact gathering and completely unscientific. This would lead to the conclusion that the Russians never found his remains. Or it could also have meant that the Russians kept a series of remains and depended on the testimonies of those physicians in order to identify a possible match. But again, no concrete or solid evidence was shown. To this day, no trace or whereabouts of Adolf Hitler is known, or will it ever be. It is a true mystery. Hitler's body is unaccountable due to weakness in scientific, misleading and unreliable sources and the destruction of what little physical evidence that existed. We can therefore draw the conclusion that Hitler's remains were destroyed shortly after his death. All rumors or theories of him being still alive are also eliminated. As for the Russians having his remains, there is much doubt that at anytime during the investigation they had Hitler's remains at all or were even close to them. But are we ever going to find out what happened in that Bunker?

In many ways Adolf Hitler succeeded in his plan to destroy his body so it may not be displayed like a war trophy. And like the man himself, his death is a true mystery of horrendous and gruesome events.

Bibliography:

Galante, Pierre, Voices from the Bunker, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New-York, 1989.

Joachimsthaler, Anton, The Last Days of Hitler, Arms and Armour, London ,1996.

Payne, Robert, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, Praeger Publisher, Washington, 1973
 

While most people believe the official version of Hitler's suicide, others are unconvinced. Perhaps the most diligent and respected researcher in this area is Argentina-based journalist and historian Abel Basti. In 2010, Basti published "El exilio de Hitler" / Hitler's Exile, in which he claimed that the official story was a fabrication.

According to Basti Hitler escaped the Allies and fled across the ocean, ultimately taking up residence in Argentina.

"Hitler escaped via air from Austria to Barcelona. The last stage of his escape was in a submarine, from Vigo, heading straight to the coast of Patagonia. Finally, Hitler and Eva Braun, in a car with a chauffeur and bodyguard—a motorcade of at least three cars—drove to Bariloche [Argentina]. He took refuge in a place called San Ramon, about 15 miles east of that town. It is a property of about 250,000 acres with a lake-front view of Lake Nahuel Huapi, which had been German property since the early twentieth century, when it belonged to a German firm by the name of Schamburg-Lippe".

Here is some of the evidence Basti uses to back up his various claims.

Hitler escaped to Spain?

Several eyewitnesses, including a still-living Jesuit priest "whose family members were friends of the Nazi leader," spotted him in Spain after his supposed death. FBI documents indicate they were looking for Hitler in Spain after the end of World War II. And an "authenticated secret German document...lists Hitler as one of the passengers evacuated by plane from Austria to Barcelona on 26 April 1945".

The Secret Submarine?

A British secret services document indicates that a Nazi submarine convoy left Spain around that time. It stopped in the Canary Islands before finally reaching Argentina.
 

The Canaries are Spanish islands, seized in the years just before Columbus' voyage. Nazi scientists from the Ahnenerbe, a research institute set up by SS Reichführer Heinrich Himmler and funded by the SS, planned to work in the Canary Islands, but were forced to postpone the project when war broke out [September 1939]. The Ahnenerbe funded Spanish excavations, provided photographic equipment, and lent aircraft to conduct aerial surveys of archaeological sites. [Garcia Alonso] Franco at first declared Spain a non-belligerent. German Führer Adolf Hitler conceived of seizing the Azores and Canaries early in the war, but was dissuaded from this adventure by his naval staff who realized that Germany might be able to seize the islands, but did not have the naval strength that would be needed to supply the island and hold them. Spain began constructing large military complex at Las Palmas [1940]. President Roosevelt saw it as a potential "German springboard" for "aggression upon the Western Hemisphere".

Unlike the Portuguese controlled Azores, the Canaries did not play a major role in the War. The British were concerned at first because it was not clear if Franco would enter the War on the side of the Axis. In Axis hands, the Islands could have disrupted sea commerce with the Dominions which provided critical supplies to the Britain. Even if the Germans did not seize the Canaries, allowing U-Boats to refuel and resupply there would provide an important support for U-Boat operations. The Canaries had, however, a serious weakness as a U-Boat base. Fuel and equipment would have to be brought in by ship. And such shipping would be vulnerable to Royal Navy interdiction. The British prepared Operation Puma to seize the Canary Islands [June 1941]. This was one of several contingency plans prepared to deal with any German plans to move against Spain and Portugal. Of course the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the same month made this much less likely. Spanish authorities denied the Canary Islands to the Kriegsmarine for refueling and rearming U-Boats [July 1941]. The British were prepared to seize the Canaries if the Spanish attacked Gibraltar. Denying U-Boast access to the Canaries, however, went a long way toward ending British concern with the Canaries. Franco decided to change Spain's status from non-belligerency to neutral. The Allies decided to treat Spain as a neutral nation [1942].   

According to the "La Provincia" daily, the Spanish dictator ordered a large network of military tunnels to be built in Gran Canaria to store torpedoes and other supplies for submarines in anticipation of Spain entering World War II on Germany’s side. 
 

Life in Argentina?

Hitler's post-war life appears to be a bit of a mystery. Basti has met numerous South American eyewitnesses who say they had known Hitler. They state that the former Nazi leader shaved his head and mustache and had several meetings with other Nazi officials. Also, FBI documents show that there were claims of Hitler living in Argentina after the war.

As for physical evidence, the Soviet Union has long been in possession of skull fragments taken from the Bunker. These have always been considered definitive proof that Hitler committed suicide via gunshot. In 2009, forensic investigators examined these fragments and determined that they came from a woman instead. And just like that, all physical evidence pointing to suicide vaporized into smoke. If there is other physical evidence pointing to suicide [or to his escape], its either lost to time or locked away somewhere [the U.S. government continues to keep many of its Hitler-related files classified, supposedly for National Security purposes - this same obsession with secrecy led to the nearly century long classification of World War I documents showing how to create invisible ink].

So, did Hitler fake his death and escape to Argentina? While it's impossible to say for sure, it certainly seems reasonable. Lesser Nazi officials successfully fled Germany and took up residence in South America. And the testimony supporting the suicide theory seems questionable at best.

Basti is presently searching for Hitler's grave in Argentina, hoping to prove his case once and for all. If Hitler escaped, the world deserves to know the truth about how he got away...and why his escape remained a secret for so long.

Two weeks after the couple’s death, and when the Battle for Berlin had ended, William Vandivert, a 33-year-old LIFE photographer, was the first Western photographer to gain access to Hitler’s Führerbunker. Vandivert photographed the almost eerie scenes inside the unlit Bunker and the room where Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves.

In his typewritten notes to his editors in New York, Vandivert described in detail what he saw. For the above photograph published in LIFE magazine in July 1945, he wrote:

“Pix of [correspondents] looking at sofa where Hitler and Eva shot themselves. Note bloodstains on arm of sofa [sic] where Eva bled. She was seated at the far end, Hitler sat in the middle and fell forward, did not bleed on sofa. This is in Hitler’s sitting room.”

The above narration by Vandivert indicates that Eva Braun was also shot.

"Even if one takes the years later submitted Russian report on Hitler's autopsy at face value, there still remains the fact that there was no trace of the corpse of Eva Braun, Hitler's mistress and later wife. This alone disproves the double-suicide theory now part of German history."

 -- H. D. Baumann and Ron T. Hansig, "Hitler's Escape".

Evidence on Eva Braun doubted
The Canberra Times
12 November 1981

LONDON, Wednesday [AAP] The woman's body found with that of Adolf Hitler in a Berlin Bunker in May, 1945, may not have been Eva Braun, according to new medical evidence.

A group of scientists has traced her dental records and is now challenging a Soviet claim to have recovered her remains, according to findings published in the British Medical Association's "News Review".

With only candles to light their way,
war correspondents examine a couch stained with blood  
[see dark patch on the arm of the sofa] located inside Hitler’s Bunker.
- Photograph: William Vandivert—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images -

Official accounts said Hitler shot himself, and Eva Braun poisoned herself in the Bunker on April 30, 1945.  The bodies were than carried up to the Chancellery garden under shellfire and burnt with petrol.

The Soviets, who carried out an autopsy on what was assumed to be her body — it was burnt beyond recognition — found six teeth and a gold bridge of four artificial teeth.

A team of forensic experts led by Norwegian-born Professor Sognnaes, emeritus professor of oral biology and anatomy at the University of California, has spent the past 10 years unearthing. Eva Braun's dental records. They found that she did not have a gold bridge, but did have two false porcelain teeth, which would almost certainly have survived a fire.

Professor Sognnaes says the plastic parts of the bridge would in any case have exploded in. the fire. He has produced evidence from a Mrs Heusermann, now in her 50s, who said the bridge, had been made for Eva Braun in the dental laboratory where she worked in 1945, but was never fitted. She says the Soviets, found it in the basement dental office in the Reich Chancellery, not in Eva Braun's body.

Professor Sognnaes said, "It is possible that Eva Braun escaped. After all, there were a number of men in the Bunker unaccounted for who could have helped her. No one actually witnessed her death.

There was no suggestion that Hitler might have escaped with her.

In Search of Eva Braun
29 April 2010

On this date in 1945, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler married his long-time mistress Eva Braun in the 'Führerbunker' in Berlin, with the Red Army just a few hundred yards away and shells exploding around them.  The two committed suicide together the next day.  She was 33 years old. He was 56. The German public was totally unaware of Braun until after her death, despite the fact that she and Hitler were together for almost 15 years.

As it turns out there is more of a genuine "mystery" about this than many may have realized, one riddled with more uncertainty and contradictory scientific evidence than is commonly assumed. It has been generally accepted for decades that Eva Braun committed suicide just before Hitler by biting on a cyanide capsule, and that Hitler then followed suit shortly thereafter by shooting himself in the head with a pistol, perhaps while also biting down simultaneously on another cyanide capsule.  But the forensic evidence for this scenario is limited.

The Germans hastily burned and then buried Hitler's and Braun's bodies in a shallow grave just outside the 'Führerbunker' immediately afterward, as instructed. The invading Red Army found the remains shortly thereafter, however, and returned them to Moscow. Nonetheless, Hitler's and Braun's deaths remained shrouded in mystery for decades afterward, even after Stalin's death in 1953. The Soviets never made public any photographs or other proof [other than copies of their own autopsy reports] that they had found these charred remains, instead interring them in a secret East German facility until 1970, at which time they were secretly dug up by the KGB, cremated, and the ashes scattered in a local river. Even this was only confirmed conclusively last year. [Why was this done only in 1970?] Only a jawbone, a skull fragment and a bloodstained sofa survived, and they languished in Soviet archives until after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was further complicated by the fact that at the end of the War, after first claiming Hitler was dead, Stalin suggested cryptically to the Allies that Hitler may have survived and fled to Argentina.

The jawbone fragment has been confirmed to be Hitler's based on his dental records.  But it has never been put on public display or DNA tested.  It is kept today in the archives of the FSB [a successor to the KGB].  The skull fragment was also assumed to be Hitler's, in particular because it had a bullet hole in it, which was consistent with the story of his death.  But last September this skull fragment was DNA tested as part of a "History Channel" show called 'Mystery Quest' To everyone's surprise, the DNA testing revealed that it was actually from a woman aged between 20 and 40.

The Secret Dossier Prepared for Stalin from the Interrogations of Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge, Hitler's Closest Personal Aides

Stalin had never been able to shake off the nightmare of Adolf Hitler. Just as in 1941 he refused to understand that Hitler had broken their non-aggression pact, he was in 1945 unwilling to believe that the dictator had committed suicide in the debris of the Berlin bunker. In his paranoia, Stalin ordered his secret police, the NKVD, precursor to the KGB, to explore in detail every last vestige of the private life of the only man he considered a worthy opponent, and to clarify beyond doubt the circumstances of his death.

For months two captives of the Soviet Army - Otto Günsche, Hitler's adjutant, and Heinz Linge, his personal valet - were interrogated daily, their stories crosschecked, until the NKVD were convinced that they had the fullest possible account of the life of the Führer. In 1949 they presented their work, in a single copy, to Stalin. It is as remarkable for the depth of its insight into Adolf Hitler--from his specific directions to Linge as to how his body was to be burned, to his sense of humor--as for what it does not say, reflecting the prejudices of the intended reader: Josef Stalin. Nowhere, for instance, does the dossier criticize Hitler's treatment of the Jews.

Today, the 413-page original of Stalin's personal biography of Hitler is a Kremlin treasure and it is said to be held in President Putin's safe. The only other copy, made by order of Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, in 1959, was deposited in Moscow Party archives under the code number 462A.

An Excerpt:

"So that's it then, the end--pour Petrol over the Führer's body and set fire to it," thought Günsche with a shudder. It was not as if Bormann's order came as a surprise to him, however. It had been bound to end like that. Hitler had neither the strength nor the courage to die the soldier's death to which, right up until the end, he had condemned German soldiers and officers, even women and children....

Hitler's eyes, which once had exuded fire, seemed extinguished; his face was the colour of earth. There were black rings beneath his eyes. The shaking in his left hand seemed to have spread to his head and whole body. The words came almost silently from his mouth: "I have ordered that my body be burnt after my death. Make sure that you carry out the order exactly. I do not wish my corpse to be taken to Moscow and put on display like a waxwork."

With some effort Hitler raised his right hand in a gesture of farewell and turned about. Baur and Rattenhuber called out. Rattenhuber made to grab Hitler's hand but the Führer retreated and vanished behind the door of his office. Mechanically but hurriedly Günsche began to make preparations for carrying out Bormann's order to burn the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. He called Hitler's chauffeur, Kempka, who was staying in the Bunker in Hermann-Göring Strasse next to the Reich Chancellery garage, and ordered him to bring 10 canisters of petrol round to the "Führerbunker" straight away and leave them by the emergency exit to the garden.

When that was done, Günsche told Kempka of Hitler's intention to take his own life. Then Günsche ordered the men from the security service and the bodyguards who were using the little room next to the emergency exit to leave. He also ordered the guards posted at the armour-plated door by the stair leading to the emergency exit to go back into the bunker. Only one man, SS-Sturmbannführer Hock was left by the emergency exit with strict orders to let no one past. Then Günsche went back into the entrance hall of the bunker and took up his position by the door in the antechamber to wait for the sound of the decisive shot. The clock showed 10 minutes past three.

Shortly afterwards Eva Braun came out of Hitler's office and sadly took Linge's hand: "Farewell Linge," she said. "I hope you get out of Berlin. If you come across my sister Gretl, don't tell her how her husband died".

Then she went to see Frau Göbbels who was in her husband's room. A few minutes later Eva Braun came out of Göbbels's room to the switchboard, where she found Günsche. "Please tell the Führer Frau Göbbels would like him to come and see her one more time". Günsche went to Hitler's office and as there was no sign of Linge, knocked on the door himself and went in. Hitler was standing by the table and started when Günsche appeared unannounced.

"What is it?" he mumbled irritably.

"Mein Führer, your wife asked me to tell you that Frau Göbbels would like to see you one more time. She is with your wife in her room".

Hitler hesitated for a moment and then went over to Göbbels's room. At 4:20 p.m. Linge came to the switchboard where Hitler's servant Krüger was standing with a guard. In the nearby sitting room next to Göbbels's bedroom Hitler was standing with Göbbels who was making one last attempt to get him to leave Berlin.

But Hitler was arguing with him hysterically: "No, Doctor. You know my decision; it is unchangeable".

Hitler went into Göbbels's bedroom where Frau Göbbels and Eva Braun were talking and said farewell to Frau Göbbels. Then he went back to his own rooms, followed by Linge and Krüger. At the door to his office Linge asked for permission to say his own farewell. Exhausted and distracted, Hitler told him: "I have given the order for a breakout. Take a small group and try to break through to the West".

Linge replied: "Mein Führer, who are we supposed to break through for?" Hitler turned to Linge and looked at him for a while in silence, then said to him pitifully: "For the next man".

The book, "Hitler's Death: Russia's Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB",  [V. K. Vinogradov et al. [eds] Chaucer Press, London, 2005]  gives Serov's letter to Beria, 31 May 1945, which states flatly that the burned corpses found in the Chancelley garden were Hitler and Braun, based on dental evidence....

As for the dental work - the situation is very iffy. In fact they story is VERY iffy about the entire corpse recovered by the Russians. According to the Soviet autopsy report, the corpse was missing its right-side ribs and its left foot. While this doesn't prove that the corpse wasn't Hitler's, it does establish that the familiar story of Hitler committing suicide in the Bunker and his corpse being carried up to ground level to be cremated and buried immediately afterwards is either wrong - or it's not Hitler's. After all, Hitler's right ribs and left foot can hardly have fallen off on the way up the stairs!

Second, the corpses discovered by the Soviets can not have been cremated in the open air, as eyewitnesses maintained. According to an anonymous British intelligence officer who stated that he had been shown the remains shortly after they had been found: "There were not two complete skeletons and none of the main bones was intact." According to W. F. Heimlich, a former intelligence officer who in 1947 was a high official in the American administration of Berlin, the corpses would probably have had to be burned in a closed crematory to achieve the condition of almost total disintegration in which they were found. Forensic scientist Hugh Thomas provided support for this conclusion. Thomas pointed out that "the damage described on the skull [in the Soviet autopsy report, parts of which were not published until 1968] could have been produced only in temperatures over 1000°C—far greater than any that could have been produced in the open garden of the Reichskanzelei".

Meanwhile, back at the teeth - on 8 May 1945, the Soviets set out to identify the corpses they suspected to be those of Adolf and Eva Hitler. That day, two Russians—chief forensic pathologist Dr Faust Sherovsky and anatomical pathologist Major Anna Marantz—autopsied the remains at SMERSH [Soviet military counter-intelligence] headquarters in the Berlin suburb of Buch. According to their report: "The most important anatomical finding for identification of the person are the teeth, with much bridgework, artificial teeth, crowns and fillings." Indeed, in the pre-DNA-testing era, the only means of obtaining a secure identification of a heavily damaged corpse was by examining the teeth and comparing them with available dental records. Unfortunately, no documents are available that describe the teeth of the two corpses as they were found on 5 May. The earliest information we have concerning their teeth derives from the autopsy report, which was written three days later. If the report can be believed, the mouth of the presumptive Hitler corpse was completely intact: "There are many small cracks in...the upper jawbones. The tongue is charred, its tip firmly locked between the teeth of the upper and lower jaws." The problem was therefore locating Hitler's dental charts. The Soviets' attempt to find them led them into a mire of intrigue and as far as it can be reconstructed from extant sources, the investigation proceeded along the following lines...

On 9 May, a Soviet military officer, a female Intelligence officer and a male translator went looking for Hitler's dentist, Generalmajor der Waffen-SS Professor Dr. Johann Hugo Blaschke, at his surgery at Kurfürstendamm 213. When they arrived, they found that Prof. Blaschke was not there and that his practice had been taken over by Dr. Fedor Bruck, a Jewish dentist who, in order to evade deportation to the east, had spent two and a half years living underground in Berlin. According to a record Dr Bruck made in 1948, some of Prof. Blaschke's files were still present at the time. But while the visitors were able to take away records for Himmler, Dr Ley, Göring and Dr. Göbbels, all of Hitler's had already been removed. However, the search was not a complete failure, for Dr. Bruck told the Soviet officers where they could find Prof. Blaschke's assistant, Käthe Heusemann, and his dental technician, Fritz Echtmann. Dr. Bruck accompanied the officers to Heusemann's apartment a short distance away in the Pariserstrasse. Heusemann was then taken to the Reich Chancellery, where a fruitless search for Hitler's dental records was conducted. The next day, 10 May, she was taken to SMERSH headquarters and ordered to examine the remains there. By this stage, the jawbones had been removed from the alleged Hitler corpse, for Heusemann was shown them in a cigar box.

This would presumably have been done in order to make them easier to study; however, this raises the problem of the chain of evidence, for we have no means of knowing whether the jawbones Heusemann was shown really came from the corpse autopsied on 8 May.

Nonetheless, Heusemann affirmed that the teeth were Hitler's. A few days later, she told Dr. Bruck that she had been able to identify them immediately. A year later, Dr Bruck told a foreign reporter that Heusemann had recognised "...an upper crown which was an anchor for a bridge on Hitler's upper jaw. The bridge had been cut because the other anchor had been extracted. The operation left surgical traces which Frau Heusemann recognized at once." According to the record of her 19 May interrogation, Heusemann recognised drill marks left behind by Prof. Blaschke in the autumn of 1944 on the fourth tooth in Hitler's left upper jaw when he had extracted two adjacent teeth. "I was holding a mirror in the mouth and watching the whole procedure with great attention," she declared. But there's a difficulty in evaluating her evidence in regard to the teeth of the alleged corpse of Eva Hitler. Her evidence for Braun was rather problematic and casts some doubt on her additional claims to have worked on Eva Braun's teeth.

Dr Bruck also told the foreign reporter that on the same occasion Heusemann had told him that she had been shown "a female bridge from the lower jaw which contained four teeth". She identified it as Eva Braun's and said, 'We made it for her only six weeks ago,' he related. She told the Russians the bridge was made by a man named Eichmann [sic], who was a dental mechanic for Dr Blaschke". However, the very information that initially seemed to confirm the identity of the female corpse only ended up disconfirming it. On 11 May, the Soviets questioned Prof. Blaschke's dental technician, Fritz Echtmann. He was interrogated about Eva Hitler's teeth on an unspecified number of other occasions in May 1945, and again on 24 July 1947. On the latter occasion, Echtmann admitted to his interrogator, a Major Vaindorf, that "At the beginning of April 1945" Prof. Blaschke had asked him "to make a small bridge for Eva Braun's right upper jaw". Echtmann seems to have been talking about the bridge which Heusemann told Dr. Bruck that the Soviets had shown her the day before. Dr Bruck told the foreign reporter about this in May 1946. He can probably be believed: there is no obvious reason that he could have known about the existence of the bridge requested by Prof. Blaschke in early April - "the 1945 bridge" - if Heusemann had not told him about it.

There are two problems with this information, however. First, the bridge Heusemann described sounds more like the bridge that had been fitted in Eva's mouth by Prof. Blaschke—Heusemann says with her assistance—in the autumn of 1944 [for simplicity's sake, "the 1944 bridge"]. The 1945 bridge was for only one tooth. The question, therefore, is why Heusemann told the Soviets—and Dr Bruck—that the 1944 bridge was the one that Prof. Blaschke had asked Echtmann to make only six weeks earlier...

Second, why did Heusemann say this if she knew that the 1945 bridge had never been inserted in Eva's mouth? At some stage—exactly when is not clear—Echtmann told his Soviet interrogators that Heusemann had told him it had never been fitted: "On 19 April, 1945, I called Professor Blaschke and told him that the small bridge was ready. He told me it would be sent to Berchtesgaden if Eva Braun was there. On the same day, 19 April, I sent the small denture to Professor Blaschke at the Reich Chancellery. Later, in a talk with his assistant Heusemann I learnt that Professor Blaschke had flown to Berchtesgaden on 20 April and had not fitted the small denture in Berlin."

The problems identified here do not damn Heusemann's evidence, but they do undermine her credibility. If she knew that Prof. Blaschke had not fitted the 1945 bridge, why did she lead the Soviets to believe that it had been fitted? The problem is compounded by the information that on 19 April, Prof. Blaschke apparently had not known whether Eva was in Berlin or not. On 19 May 1945, Heusemann told the Soviets that "a month ago we extracted one tooth [from Eva] in the upper jaw, the 6th one on the left". Since Eva apparently arrived in Berlin in mid-April—the precise date does not appear to be known—and Prof. Blaschke left the city on 20 April, the extraction must have been performed during the period 15–20 April. In these circumstances, Prof. Blaschke must surely have known that Evawas in Berlin. What's more, since the bridge contained the false tooth to be inserted in the place of the extracted tooth, it made little sense not to have established in advance when and where the bridge was to be fitted. There is something rather slipshod and unlikely about all this.

Then there is the problem that Prof. Blaschke already knew in early April that Eva would need a tooth extracted. It is not clear why he therefore did not remove the tooth then, rather than wait until the denture was ready. Perhaps he wanted to replace the tooth with the denture almost immediately. But if he waited a few weeks until the denture was ready, why was it not fitted the day Echtmann sent it over to the Reich Chancellery surgery on 19 April? Since Eva was in Berlin, Prof. Blaschke had ample opportunity to insert the fitting, either the same day or the following day [20 April]. After all, Blaschke's flight to Berchtesgaden did not take place until the early hours of 21 April. We therefore do not know what really happened to the 1945 bridge—whether Blaschke fitted it in Berlin and Heusemann had lied to [or simply misinformed] Echtmann, whether Blaschke took it on the plane with him to Berchtesgaden or whether he left it behind in Berlin, perhaps for his replacement, Dr Helmut Kunz, to insert in Eva's mouth.

The striking fact however is that "Hitler's Death"—the published collection of documents from Soviet archives allegedly proving that the human remains which the Soviets found on 5 May had been those of Adolf and Eva Hitler—contains neither Heusemann's 10 May interrogation report nor Echtmann's 11 May interrogation report. What's more, although Dr Kunz took Prof. Blaschke's place on 23 April, his interrogation record yields no information as to whether he worked on Eva Hitler's teeth after that date. Without any more information to go on, it is not possible to say what the real significance of the 1945 bridge was. What can be said is that if, during his first interrogation on 11 May 1945, Echtmann revealed to the Soviets that the small bridge had never been fitted, this would explain why, on or about 15 May, apparently without any advance warning, the Soviets took Heusemann into custody. The fact that Heusemann was repeatedly interrogated by Soviet intelligence agents suggests that information was continually coming to light that rendered her evidence problematic. On 19 May, Lt-General Vadis interrogated her for nearly five hours. A partial record of this interrogation does appear in "Hitler's Death".

According to this document, Heusemann said that she had been able to verify that the teeth were Eva's because she recognised a "gold and resin bridge" that, with her assistance, Prof. Blaschke had inserted in the right part of Eva's lower jaw in the "summer of 1944 " . At a later date—no earlier than 23 July 1947— Heusemann was still being pressed for a full description of Eva Hitler's teeth. In this statement, she implied that Eva had a false tooth in her upper right jaw—which she can only have done if the 1945 bridge had been fitted after all!

Such prolonged and intensive questioning is inconsistent with the idea that the information Heusemann provided had been sufficient to establish that the teeth were Eva's. If so, why ask her to go over the subject again and again? There are therefore plenty of hints of intrigue, but thanks to the fact that only very brief selections from her interrogations are included in 'Hitler's Death', it is not possible to chronicle the development of her story. The same goes for Echtmann's evidence: 'Hitler's Death' only contains statements he gave on 24 July 1947, not those he gave in May 1945 during what appear to have been at least four or five interrogations.

Heusemann's and Echtmann's fate supports the conclusion that the Soviets found something fishy about their evidence. Within two days of each other in August 1951, Heusemann and Echtmann were arrested by Soviet MGB [Ministry of State Security] officials. Heusemann was charged with "having treated Hitler, Himmler and other Nazi leaders until April 1945", while Echtmann was charged with "assisting Hitler and his circle". Each was sentenced to 10 years in a Soviet labour camp. Neither person appears ever to have been repatriated and it is a fair guess that both vanished in the Gulag. It seems hard to credit the idea that their crimes really consisted of having provided Hitler and other top Nazis with dental treatment; more likely, both paid the ultimate price for trying to deceive Stalin.

But the story doesn't end there...

It's obvious that Heusemann's evidence was problematic to say the least. She told the Soviets and Dr Bruck that the bridge that was shown to her had been made recently, yet it more closely resembles the bridge she claimed to have helped Prof. Blaschke insert in the summer of 1944 than the 1945 bridge. In view of the issues raised in relation to Eva's teeth that undermine her credibility, it is important to ask whether Heusemann was actually competent to assess the evidence concerning the teeth of the presumptive Hitler corpse discovered on 5 May. By 10 May, the jawbones had been removed from the "Hitler" corpse and placed in a cigar box and shown to Heusemann. ..

The problem is - that all of Heusemann's claims to have worked on Hitler's teeth—claims which are iterated on several occasions in 'Hitler's Death'—appear to be false.

In early 1948, while still in American captivity, Prof. Blaschke gave an interview in which he stated that Heusemann "cannot give a positive identification because she knows only some X-rays of Hitler's teeth". Thus, Heusemann's knowledge of Hitler's teeth derived solely from the X-rays and not from personal experience. She can therefore never have helped Prof. Blaschke work on Hitler's teeth six times between 1944 and 1945, as she told her Soviet interrogators, and can only have recognised the "drill marks" she told Dr Bruck about from the X-rays she had studied.

She therefore had no means of knowing whether the X-rays accurately represented the condition of Hitler's mouth or that of someone else!

If you accept that Heusemann had lied about having worked on Hitler's teeth, you also have to doubt Heusemann's claim to have worked also on the teeth of Eva Hitler and many leading Nazis. According to the testimony she gave the Soviets, she had worked at the Reich Chancellery dental surgery from December 1944 until 20 April 1945. She specifically claimed to have helped Prof. Blaschke extract a tooth from Eva Hitler in April 1945. However, despite the relatively long period involved—around four months—there is no account that corroborates her presence in the Reich Chancellery surgery, aside from the aforementioned contact between Heusemann and Echtmann that does not prove that she really worked there. 

During the period from 20 April to 2 May 1945, Heusemann is also supposed to have remained in the Chancellery. Dr Bruck told reporters that for safety reasons she had remained in the Chancellery "in the last days of Berlin". It is odd, then, that she was not mentioned by Dr Kunz, who took over from Prof. Blaschke at the Chancellery surgery on 23 April. (Dr Kunz apparently had no assistant at all.) The conclusion has to be that Heusemann was probably nothing more than an opportunist, someone who sought to profit from knowledge of the dental charts she had gained in 1944(–45?) while working for Prof. Blaschke and to ingratiate herelf with the occupying Russians. To this end, Heusemann appears to have involved Dr Bruck. According to Dr Bruck himself, he renewed his acquaintanceship with Heusemann on 4 May, when he located her in the Pariserstrasse. Possibly on this day she drew him into her confidence and explained how she had enjoyed access to Hitler's "dental records".

Although he had been living underground in Berlin since October 1942—and was reportedly destitute by the time the Soviets entered Steglitz (the quarter of the city in which he had been hiding) on 26 April 1945—Dr Bruck was placed in a position by Heusemann to take over Prof. Blashke's surgery less than a week after they had renewed their association. This was quite a coup, for the surgery was located in Berlin's most fashionable street. Dr Bruck's prior relationship with Heusemann offers the only plausible explanation for this cosy arrangement. Heusemann had worked for Dr Bruck when he was a school dentist in her home town of Liegnitz (Silesia) in the mid-1930s. She moved to Berlin in April 1937 to work for Prof. Blaschke. It is possible that, knowing he would probably never return, Prof. Blaschke gave Heusemann the rights to the surgery after he left Berlin on 20 April; if so, she might have considered it a good idea to secure her right to the practice in the new post-Nazi era by placing it in the care of a Jewish dentist she knew and trusted.

Remember - it was Dr Bruck who told Soviet investigators about Heusemann and Echtmann. Having established on 4 May where she lived, he was in a position to lead them straight to her when they arrived at the Kurfürstendamm surgery on 9 May. By that date, Dr Bruck had already taken over the surgery and moved into its apartment. It was obviously extremely convenient for them that Dr Bruck was on hand to meet them when they arrived. If the surgery had been abandoned altogether, the Soviets would have had to go to a good deal more trouble to track down anyone who apparently possessed the necessary competence to evaluate the alleged Hitler dental evidence. Things couldn't have been made any easier for them!

Second, there is the puzzling instance of foreknowledge. When the Soviet investigators arrived at the surgery, Dr Bruck seemed to know why they had come. He asked them if they were seeking to identify some "fragments" they had found. While it would not have taken much by way of brains to guess they were seeking to identify a corpse, Bruck's use of the word fragments—which has the exact same meaning in German as it does in English [i.e. fragments]—seems quite a slip. What is sometimes referred to as Hitler's jawbone [i.e., in the singular] is actually a collection of four fragments! Dr Bruck must have known in advance that it was not a question of identifying an intact set of teeth. It was a slip that implies intention to deceive the Soviets. Third is the striking fact that Dr Bruck was the first person to reveal to Western reporters that the Soviets had called on Heusemann to identify teeth they presumed to be Hitler's. After Heusemann and Echtmann vanished into Soviet prisons in mid-May 1945, Dr Bruck never gave up trying to pass on information to the West that confirmed Western suspicions that the Soviets had found Hitler's body. On 5 July 1945, two days after the Western Allies were allowed to enter Berlin, Dr Bruck began scouting out foreign reporters to ask if they knew anything about Heusemann's fate. Although there is no reason to doubt that he felt genuine concern for her safety, Dr Bruck had the opportunity from such contacts with foreign reporters to ensure that the information which the Soviets had gleaned from Heusemann, but had been withholding, reached the West at last. On 9 July, an article by William Forrest was published in the "British News Chronicle" that incorporated information Dr Bruck had given Forrest on 7 July. Dr Bruck obviously wanted to ensure that Heusemann's information entered circulation, whether the Soviets liked it or not. Fourth, in 1947 Dr Bruck was very nearly arrested by the Soviets. At that time, the Americans warned him that the Soviets had decided to arrest him. Had he not been warned in time, they would surely have succeeded and Dr Bruck would have joined Heusemann and Echtmann in Soviet captivity. Instead, Dr Bruck emigrated to the United States and in 1952 acquired American citizenship. [He spent the last 30 years of his life living in New York under the Anglicised name of Theodor Brooke].

The thesis that best accounts for events, therefore, is that on 4 May Dr Bruck struck a deal with Heusemann to ensure that the Soviets would believe that they had found the remains of Adolf and Eva Hitler. In return for services such as ensuring that the Soviets were able to locate Heusemann and Echtmann without difficulty, Dr Bruck appears to have been rewarded with Prof. Blaschke's Kurfürstendamm surgery. And once all paper records or x-rays were destroyed or got out of the way - the only person to survive the war who genuinely possessed the expertise to identify Hitler's teeth was Prof. Blaschke himself....

...who the Russians did NOT have

The Soviets must have been overjoyed when in July 1945 Prof.Blaschke turned up in an American camp for prominent POWs. They promptly sent him a bag containing all the necessary equipment and ordered him to reconstruct, as perfectly as his memory enabled him, the appearance of Hitler's jawbone. The result, we are told, perfectly matched the jawbone Heusemann had identified as Hitler's...BUT if Blaschke's evidence corroborated Heusemann's identification, the proof itself has never been published. Although the Americans had Prof. Blaschke in their hands from May 1945, when he was captured, until late 1948, they never made public any of the information he shared with them about Hitler's teeth. On 5 February 1946, for example, he was interrogated by US military intelligence on precisely this subject. However, the report based on the 1946 interview was never released and remains classified by the US Department of Defense even today.

Given that by 1946 the Americans were extremely keen to publicise any information which suggested that the Soviets really had discovered Hitler's corpse, it must be the case that, wittingly or otherwise, Prof. Blaschke had given them information that contradicted this position.

Or else we WOULD have heard about it...

It is also hard to draw any firm conclusions from an interview Prof. Blaschke gave on the subject of Hitler's teeth while still in American captivity in early 1948. Although on this occasion Prof. Blaschke expressed confidence that the Soviets really did have Hitler's jawbone, he made two remarks that only undermined this view. First, as we saw above, he stated that Heusemann had not been qualified to give a "positive identification". Second, Prof. Blaschke challenged the Soviets to show him the jaw in question: "Why don't the Russians show this jaw to me? I only need one look and can definitely state this is or is not Hitler's jaw ." Is the answer that the Soviets knew that it was not really Hitler's??? 

Prof. Blaschke may even have been punished for these indiscretions. Towards the end of 1948, just as the Americans were about to release him, Prof. Blaschke was tried by a German "denazification" court and sentenced to a further three years in prison. Was he being punished for more than just having been Hitler's dentist? Prof. Blaschke was released from prison and practised dentistry in Nuremberg until he died in 1959. He never said anything further about Hitler's teeth. His silence on the subject seems almost inexplicable. Information derived from Prof. Blaschke is also conspicuously absent from "Hitler's Death". If it was Prof. Blaschke's reconstruction of Hitler's jawbone that helped clinch the identification of the alleged Hitler remains for the Soviets, there can be no reason for omitting it from the "Hitler's Death" volume. In these circumstances it seems highly likely that Prof. Blaschke's evidence had only confirmed what the Soviets had already suspected—that they had been led or led themselves down the garden path.....
 

The Truth about Hitler's Death
By Michael Curtis
24 April 2018

Some people like to posit conspiracy theories: Elvis is still alive; Princess Diana was murdered by British intelligence; the Moon landing was a hoax; Protocols of the Elders of Zion is genuine, not a tsarist forgery.  And Adolf Hitler did not kill himself and Eva Braun in his bunker on April 30, 1945, but escaped through a set of secret tunnels and was flown to Denmark, then to Spain, where he was protected by General Francisco Franco, and finally to Argentina.

The world was told by Josef Stalin at the Potsdam Conference of July-August 1945, attended by the Soviet Union, the U.S. [Harry Truman], and the U.K. [Winston Churchill and then Clement Attlee], that Hitler was not dead.  This was reinforced by Marshall Georgy Zhukov, at the time commander and military governor of the Soviet Zone in Germany, who declared on 9 June 1945 that "[w]e have found no corpse that could be Hitler'".."

Throughout the years after World War II conspiracy theories in German and in English abounded, and various people have claimed to have sighted Hitler, as many claim to have seen the eternal Elvis.  They have persisted despite refutation by many reputable historians such as Hugh Trevor Roper ["The Last Days of Hitler"], Alan Bullock ["Hitler: A Study in Tyranny"], and Ian Kershaw ["Hitler: A Biography"].  They agree on the daily events.  At midnight on 28 April 1945, Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, and the register was signed by Josef Göbbels and Martin Bormann.

The next day, Hitler dictated his political testament on the war: "it will go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestation of the people's will to live".  A day later, Hitler ended his will to live.  He shot himself in the mouth, and Braun took cyanide.  Göbbels and his family all committed suicide.  Bormann probably killed himself when trapped by Soviet troops while trying to escape, his body unidentified until years later.  One important inference from this narrative is that Germany had not been "stabbed in the back," an allegation that had been used by Hitler and others to explain Germany's defeat in World War I.  In fact, the Soviet group SMERSH [Death to Spies, three counter-Intelligence agencies in the Red Army, later fictionalized as the evil opposition in James Bond movies] searched for the body of Hitler, which was found.

A personal version of the truth is now revealed in a remarkable book published in English, "The Memories of a War-Time Interpreter", by Yelena Rzhevskaya [original name Kagan], who died on 1 April 2017, aged 97.  She was in Berlin, aged 25, at the time when the city was in ruins at the end of the war, while the Red Army was tracking down die-hard Nazi fighters.  Her nominal role in counter-Intelligence was interrogating captured Germans.

To her surprise, she was given by her commanding officer a box that was said to contain Hitler's teeth.  A burnt body, thought to be that of Hitler but unrecognizable, had been found by a Red Army soldier, and the jawbone had been removed to provide possible identification.  Yelena was given the task, she said, because she was a woman and less likely to get drunk in the heady atmosphere of Berlin and lose the items.

Yelena recounts what is akin to a detective story, examining the fragments of Hitler's jaw to match it with dental records and x-rays.  She began tracking down Germans who had information about Hitler's teeth, first one dentist, then a clinic, and then another dentist whose office was in fashionable Kurfürstendamm, where she found the dental records but not the X-Rays.  Then she finally found the X-Rays in another surgery, compared the records with the teeth she had, and concluded they were the same.

In this search, she was helped by a woman named Käthe Heusermann, an assistant in dental surgery to Hitler's dentist, Dr. Hugo Blaschke.  Josef Stalin's cruelty needs no further illustration, but this innocent and helpful woman was arrested and deported to the Soviet Union.  She was sentenced to a prison term of ten years in a Gulag, six in solitary confinement, because she "voluntarily helped a bourgeois state prolong the war".

Yelena had proved that Hitler had not escaped and was sure that "in a few days the whole world will know we had found the corpse," but she was unaware of the political machinations.  The Soviet press spread reports that Hitler was missing.  Stalin would not allow the truth of Hitler's death to be known, and it was only at an exhibition in Moscow in 2000, the 55th anniversary of the end of World War II, that Hitler's teeth were put on display.  

Stalin was opposed to a policy of détente, thought the Soviet Union "remained in capitalist encirclement," and believed there would be less pressure on the Soviet Union if people thought Hitler was still alive.  One implication was that Hitler was hidden in Bavaria, which was part of the U.S. zone of occupation in Germany, and that the U.S. had used Hitler to get in touch with remaining Nazis.

One reason for this belief was Russian suspicion of Operation Sunrise.  The Nazis had a plan that after the fall of Berlin, they would continue the war from fortresses in Bavaria where Hitler and other leaders lived.  The area had miles of tunnels built in the mountains.  Operation Sunrise consisted of negotiations between Allen Dulles and Waffen general Karl Wolff over the surrender of a Germany Army group of about a million located in northern Italy and western Austria.  Stalin believed that the plan indicated an anti-Soviet alliance and that the allies had made an agreement to give Hitler safe passage.

The argument still continues, with some believers in the conspiracy that Hitler did not die in the Berlin Bnker and even that the dental records may have been faked.  But anyone reading Yelena's fascinating and honest book will reject the view that in some way and for some reason the U.S. and Allies helped Hitler escape.  There was no Western version of the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939.
 

10 Genuine Reasons To Consider That Hitler Really Did Escape Berlin
Marcus Lowth
26 February 2018

Like the declarations that “Elvis Presley Is Alive,” the claims that Adolf Hitler didn’t die in Berlin have continued since the announcement of his apparent death. There are many reasons for this beyond just random sightings and suspicious claims.For example, most of us have heard and dismissed the claims of body doubles and mismatched skull fragments. Also, Hitler’s dead body has never been found. However, an intriguing argument can be made that Hitler may have faked his death and escaped from the ruins of Berlin with the help of his closest Nazi officers.So, where might he have gone?

10 Patagonia - Home away from Home

The Patagonia region of Argentina was known to the Nazis long before the start of World War II. Its population was made up of German immigrants and their descendants. The belief in Nazism was rife and remained so for years after the war. Even the local schools taught the same beliefs as the schools in Germany under the Third Reich.It would make sense then that Hitler would choose Patagonia [or have it chosen for him] as a place of refuge. By the mid-1940s, reports show that the area was closed off like a cult compound, with necessities delivered from the outside once a week.Interestingly, the waters come right up to this region and are deep enough to accommodate submarines on the coast. Also, there are purposely built and strengthened airstrips commissioned by the Nazi regime years before the war’s end.To some researchers, this is an obvious sign of preparations for an exodus of the Third Reich’s most powerful and trusted ranking officers. If that was the case, then such an exodus would surely include Hitler. We already know that many other Nazi officials found their way to this part of the world.

9 Secret Tunnel Systems

So how did Hitler get out of Berlin in the first place?According to some researchers, Hitler used the secret tunnel system that ran under Berlin and connected to the Bunker. Through various levels and connections, he and a small team emerged, largely “hidden in plain sight,” in one of the train stations. From there, they made their way to a waiting plane.]Supposedly, the station used to exit the tunnel systems is known today as Luftbrüke station. While filming "Hunting Hitler" for The History Channel, the producers uncovered the remains of the tunnel system using special sonar equipment.Furthermore, although the dates don’t match exactly with other researchers’ claims, these producers uncovered records of “increased activity” from a nearby runway at Tempelhof Airport on 21 April 1945. The last official sighting of Hitler had occurred one day earlier on 20 April 20, his birthday.

8 Submarine Journeys And Evidence Of Way Stations

Some of the most intriguing clues to a predetermined plan were the vast amounts of fuel and supplies stored at a purposely built way station in the Canary Islands.It is believed that Hitler flew to Spain shortly after arriving in Denmark, with Franco offering to provide Hitler safe passage from Spain to Gibraltar and then on to the Canary Islands. From there, Hitler and Eva Braun boarded one submarine and other high-ranking Nazi officers boarded one of two others.In a further twist, the Germans sent a group of submarines toward New York at around the same time and appeared to feed false Intelligence that they were planning to launch a V-2 missile from them as one final attack on the United States. It was enough to draw the Allies’ attention to track this group of submarines in the North Atlantic, leaving the three heading to South America virtually unnoticed.

7 The Numerous Sightings By Many People

There is no doubt that many so-called sightings of Hitler are merely cases of mistaken identity or even attempts to cash in on conspiracy theories. However, numerous sightings of Hitler in South America, especially in Argentina, are on record, particularly in the decade or so after the end of the war.Even as far back as 1945, journalist Johannes Steel wrote that “Argentina is teeming with unmolested Nazi War criminals!” Since then, many people have spoken of their sightings.In summer 1945, 15-year-old Catalina Gomero was living with the Eichhorn family, who were known supporters of Hitler. Years later, she recalled that a man had stayed with them. She both recognized and was informed by Mrs. Eichhorn that he was Adolf Hitler.Gomero went on to say that she had memorized HItler’s voice during the four days that he stayed with the family because she was so fascinated by his presence. According to her, Hitler had continued to telephone the Eichhorns until 1962.]Another known supporter of Hitler and the Nazi regime was Ante Pavelic, who escaped from Europe following the war. While working as a carpenter at Pavelic’s building site, Hernan Ancin witnessed several meetings between Hitler and Pavelic in the early 1950s.According to many people who claimed to have seen Hitler during this time, his mustache had been shaved off and his hair was considerably grayer. Ancin also stated that the former leader of the Third Reich looked ill and in distress.

6 The ‘Almost’ Apprehension On Necochea’s Beach

On the night that Hitler is thought by many researchers to have set foot on South American soil, an Argentinian patrol unit missed an opportunity to apprehend him. A short while later, they were seemingly hot on the Führer’s tail, with German soldiers arrested to boot. But then the patrol unit was ordered by their superiors to stand down, forget the matter, and let their prisoners go.So, what happened? On the evening of 27 July 1945, the police had received reports of “unusual activity” along the coast. Flashing lights were going back and forth from the Necochea beach to a point not far from the shore.A small police unit arrested a German man who was using Morse code to signal an unidentified vessel in the waters. They interrogated the man for most of the night. By the morning of 28 July, the man had admitted to aiding a German submarine that wished to “unload” on the beach.When more police units arrived at the spot of the apprehension later that morning, they found clear evidence that such an unloading operation had taken place. Some officers followed tire marks to a secluded farm. After contacting his superiors, the leader led his men onto the property.According to reports, four German soldiers with submachine guns soon approached the officers. As a result, the Necochea police arrested the soldiers and held them while awaiting further instructions. Two hours later, the police were ordered to release the soldiers.Whether Hitler was at the farmhouse is open to debate. But there was certainly evidence of activity involving heavily armed German soldiers and some kind of “delivery” from a German submarine. Of course, the order to release the soldiers without any follow-up is suspicious in itself.

5 Martin Bormann

Perhaps the person of most interest in the high ranks of the Nazis was Martin Bormann. Slowly, he moved any person of influence away from Hitler during the war years and thus became Hitler’s most trusted confidant.Bormann appears to have been the brains behind Hitler’s escape, including where he would go and how he would get there—that is, if you subscribe to the conspiracy theories. And with Bormann, there are many.According to some researchers, Bormann made his way to Patagonia after Hitler’s resettlement there. Bormann relied on contacts within the Vatican to travel south to Italy. From there, he supposedly left Europe.As the years went by and Hitler’s health declined, it is claimed that Bormann distanced himself from the former fuhrer. Instead of organizing a Fourth Reich, Bormann simply became a ruthless, mercenary businessman who was concerned with his personal wealth and influence. Some researchers—including Paul Manning—claimed that Bormann lived well into the early 1980s.Officially, Bormann is still missing, although a corpse discovered near Lehrter station was identified as his body in 1972. Some researchers, however, believe that this was simply a way to tie up loose ends. In his book "Babylon’s Banksters", Joseph Farrell claims that Bormann was alive and well after the war and was one of the driving forces behind the first Bilderberg meeting in 1954.

4 Hitler’s Death In 1962

According to the claims of Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams in their book "Grey Wolf", Adolf Hitler was in his seventies when he died in his bed in February 1962. He had been long abandoned by his wife, Eva, and by virtually all his Nazi henchmen.These claims are allegedly based on the papers of Dr. Otto Lehmann, who treated Hitler in the final months of his life. The papers were reproduced in Manuel Monasterio’s book about Hitler’s life in Argentina.According to Lehmann’s notes, Hitler’s health rapidly declined in the early weeks of 1962. The doctor often heard moans and cries of anguish and despair from the room in which Hitler spent most of his time. Supposedly, Hitler suffered a paralyzing stroke on 12 February. He died the following day after falling into a coma.Incidentally, not everyone buys into the theories that Hitler survived the war. Some people attacked "Grey Wolf" as an absurd fantasy.

3 The Pilot Who Flew Hitler To Denmark

Earlier, we mentioned that Hitler escaped his Bunker through the tunnel systems under Berlin and then continued to a waiting plane. Captain Peter Baumgart, a former Luftwaffe pilot, claimed that he flew the plane. He stated this during a trial in which he was sentenced to five years in prison for SS membership.He maintained that he flew Hitler, Eva Braun, and several other high-ranking officers from Berlin to the Danish town of Tonder in May 1945. Upon their safe arrival, Hitler shook Baumgart’s hand and transferred a piece of paper into it. When Baumgart looked at the paper later, it was a check for 20,000 Marks.The pilot was ordered to return to Berlin. Although he wasn’t sure what happened to Hitler after he left, the rumor was that Hitler had boarded a submarine bound for South America. Baumgart had to undergo serious mental evaluation after his trial, which led most people to label him an unreliable fantasist. However, those who subscribe to this theory argue that making such a key witness “unreliable” through mental evaluation is easily achieved if there is a conspiracy to cover up the truth.

2 FBI Documents And Media Reports

Many FBI documents have become declassified since the end of World War II. Although none of them conclusively prove that Hitler escaped from Berlin, the sheer number of previous classified reports about Hitler sightings tells us that the FBI took them seriously. And these are just the ones that have been released to the public.These reports date to the immediate aftermath of the war, suggesting that the intelligence services at least entertained the possibility that Hitler’s escape was genuine. Many newspaper reports, that were based on Intelligence reports to journalists, also suggested that Hitler escaped from his Bunker and arrived safely in Argentina. Incidentally, some mainstream historians blame the Soviet Union for these theories and rumors as perhaps the first acts of disinformation during the Cold War.

1 The Assistance Of Juan And Eva Peron

Some of the more unsettling claims about Hitler’s escape to Argentina concern the support he received from then-President Juan Peron and his soon-to-be wife, Eva. She was also known as “Evita,” the same woman portrayed by Madonna in a movie years later.Juan Peron was more than sympathetic to Nazi ideology, if only for monetary gain and power. It is claimed that Eva Peron was even more enthralled. She allowed fleeing Nazis safe passage into Argentina using her status and influence. In exchange, she accepted treasures, jewelry, and even money stolen from Jewish families who had been murdered in the concentration camps of Europe.The Perons were close friends with Hitler and supposedly met with him several times following his arrival in Patagonia after the war. Perhaps this relationship explains why the Necochea police unit was ordered to stand down in July 1945 when it appeared that they were one step away from the biggest arrest of the 20th century.

Scientists say Hitler died in WWII. Tell that to ‘Adolf Schüttelmayor’ and the Nazi Moon Base.
By Avi Selk
The Washingtpn Post
20 May 2018

After completing what they say is the first examination of Adolf Hitler’s remains since World War II, a team of researchers has announced that the Nazi leader most definitely died in Berlin and, therefore, cannot possibly still be alive on the moon.

The study was no easy feat. Over the past 73 years, Hitler’s presumed corpse has been set on fire, secretly buried, dug up by the Soviets, hidden by the KGB and finally ordered destroyed.

Hitler’s person, meanwhile, has appeared in the fantasies of all manner of conspiracy theorists who insist his body is a fake.

So last year, a team of French researchers persuaded the Russian government to let them inspect the last two bits of Hitler known to exist: a bullet-shot chunk of skull and a set of frankly disgusting teeth.

They compared these fragments to war-era autopsy records and concluded that, yep, those are definitely Hitler’s teeth.

“There is no possible doubt. Our study proves that Hitler died in 1945,” co-author Philippe Charlier told "Agence France-Presse" after the paper was published in the "European Journal of Internal Medicine"..

“He did not flee to Argentina in a submarine,” Charlier continued. “He is not in a hidden base in Antarctica or on the dark side of the moon.”

The professor is by no means the first researcher to try to debunk claims that Hitler survived World War II, which have persisted for decades despite the derision of nearly all mainstream historians.

But just in case Charlier is right and his study really does mark the end of Hitler survival fiction, we have memorialized the genre for the sake of posterity.

We present below the many lives and deaths of Adolf Hitler, in descending order of plausibility.

1. Hitler died heroically in battle

Actually, Charlier’s team concluded, Hitler most probably died with his wife while hiding in his Berlin Bunker, quite possibly after swallowing a cyanide pill and then shooting himself in the head for good measure. In this, the study confirmed what has long been the official account of his death.

Maybe one reason that so many people have had trouble accepting the official version of Hitler’s demise is that it started out as a baldfaced lie.

At 10:20 p.m. on the day after Hitler’s suicide, a German admiral addressed the country by radio. He announced somberly that Hitler had died a few hours earlier, fighting “at the head of his troops.”

This sad fantasy was recounted in the book “The Death of Hitler,” whose authors noted that it was believed by much of the world. A doctor even testified in a deposition that he had tried to save the wounded leader: “A shell fragment had pierced the uniform, went through his chest and entered the lungs on both sides,” he told a court. “It was no use to do anything.”

Inevitably, the notion of Hitler the war hero was shown to be a hastily conceived fraud, but the Nazis and their conquerors didn’t exactly make it easy for the public to learn the trutClos

2. Hitler lived!

As Charlier and his co-authors wrote in their paper last week, Hitler had demanded in his will that the Soviet forces about to overrun Berlin not be allowed to defile his corpse.

Accordingly, his lieutenants doused his body in benzine, lighted it on fire and buried it in a nearby shell crater.

Of course the occupying Soviets found the body anyway, autopsied Hitler and concluded that he had killed himself in a suitably cowardly fashion.

But rather than let the world examine the same evidence, the Soviets kept Hitler’s body hidden for decades, until the KGB was finally ordered to destroy the corpse in the 1970s, leaving only the shard of skull and jawbone in the Kremlin’s possession.

As explained in “The Death of Hitler,” the Russians found it politically useful to keep the world guessing about Hitler’s fate. To sow chaos, we might say today.

And the strategy worked. There was mass public confusion about when, how and whether Hitler had died.

In an information vacuum, newspapers quickly filled up with stories of sketchy sightings of the Nazi leader, the book recalled: Hitler posing as a casino croupier in France; Hitler working as a shepherd in the Alps; Hitler living as a hermit in a cave.

So rampant was the disinformation that even Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower entertained the possibility of Hitler’s survival.

3. Hitler’s great submarine escape

In loving detail and with minimal disclaimers, the "Daily Mail" once recounted one of the more elaborate legends of Hitler’s escape from Allied-conquered Europe, beginning with the besieged leader contemplating his future staring at a portrait of Frederick the Great.

“A Fourth Reich would surely rise, and he would be needed to lead it,” Hitler thought, the "Mail" wrote. “That left one option: escape.”

So three days before his purported suicide, Hitler ordered two corpses to be dressed as himself and his wife. He waited until the stroke of midnight, then slipped out of his Bunker via a secret tunnel and sneaked through the bombed-out city of Berlin. He rendezvoused with an airplane he had arranged to meet him on an abandoned thoroughfare, then flew to Denmark and then Spain, then commandeered a submarine and escaped to South America, where he lived out his days in peace.

“To most of us, such a story sounds like utter fantasy,” the "Mail" noted at the end of this adventure. “But there are some who regard it as the absolute truth.”

Indeed, the newspaper wrote, Hitler’s supposed escape by submarine has inspired so many pseudo-historical books about his latter days that rival authors occasionally accuse one another of plagiarism.

4. The tropical adventures of “Adolf Schüttelmayor” and friends

Like all the best conspiracy theories, the story of Hitler’s retirement in South America intersects with just enough reality to make it vaguely plausible, without being so tied down to facts that it risks being disproved.

A Nazi U-Boat really did disappear near the end of World War II, for example. And many high-ranking Nazis really did escape to the Americas, sometimes evading capture for years.

Last year, a newly declassified cache of government documents revealed that the CIA actually investigated a report that Hitler was among them.

A “fairly reliable” source contacted the agency’s base in Venezuela in 1955, according to a CIA memo, and shared a photograph of two men taken in Colombia the previous year.

The clean-shaven man on the left was a former German SS trooper, according to the source. And the man on the right was supposed to be Hitler. He had apparently changed his name to “Adolf Schüttelmayor” but was not so worried about discovery that he felt it necessary to shave his mustache.

Hitler’s alleged presence in Colombia was an open secret in some circles, a subsequent CIA investigation found. In a city “overly populated with former German Nazis,” the former SS officer told an agency source, Schüttelmayor was idolized by those who knew his real identity. They called him “Der Führer” and honored him with the old Nazi salutes.

The CIA station chief continued to pursue the case but was eventually told by his superiors that “enormous efforts could be expended on this matter with remote possibilities of establishing anything concrete".

So Schüttelmayor, whoever he was, was thereafter left alone.

The file, written by Caracas bureau chief David Brixnor, was wired to Washington in 1955 alongside a picture allegedly showing Hitler with the CIA source Citroen.

Handwritten notes on the document claim a second confidential informant — given the codename CIMELODY-3 — was “fairly reliable”.

The document adds that the picture included “was taken with Hitler not too long ago”.

It added Citroen’s belief that the Allies would be unable to prosecute Hitler for war crimes because ten years had passed since the end of the war.

Argentine journalist defends thesis that Hitler escaped to Colombia
By Miquel Vera
5 May 2017

 Argentine journalist Abel Basti has researched Adolf Hitler's alleged life in Latin America aBy Miquel Verafter the fall of the Third Reich and says he has proof that the Führer was in Colombia in 1954. 

 Adolf Hitler died in 1945, according to official accounts, but an Argentine journalist who has researched the dictator's alleged life in Latin America after the fall of the Third Reich says he has proof that the Fuhrer was in Colombia in 1954.

"I have a CIA document that says Hitler was in Colombia, plus a CIA photo of Hitler in the town of Tunja meeting with another Nazi called Phillipe Citroen in 1954. Besides, while I was staying in Colombia I interviewed people who told me he was here," journalist Abel Basti, author of the 2016 Planeta book "Hitler's Secrets," said in an interview with EFE in Bogota.

Basti, who presented his new work at the Bogota International Book Fair [Filbo], said he has completed the necessary procedures to request the Colombian Defense Ministry to declassify documents that would be the final proof of the dictator's stay in the South American country.

The journalist said has also uncovered evidence that the Nazi stayed at a hotel called Residencias Coloniales near Tunja, capital of the central Colombian province of Boyaca, whose manager at the time was a German.

The author said that in the area, just 130 kilometers [80 miles] from Bogota, was a large German community where they even greeted Hitler with the Nazi salute.

According to Basti, when Hitler, 56, escaped to Latin America in a submarine with his wife in the 1950s, he was in good physical and mental health, and eventually died of old age.

"Stalin told press conferences that Hitler had escaped toward Spain or Argentina - that's in his diaries, not in classified information. Eisenhower, who was army chief of staff during the occupation of Berlin before he became US president, said in 1953 that he had no evidence that the dictator committed suicide in the bunker," he said.

Basti warned that the version of Hitler's escape was changed after Stalin's death in 1953, when the theory of the Fuhrer's suicide began to be promoted.

Basti's new book also describes the "complicity and support" Hitler received during his rise to power, which explains the protection the dictator received after the fall of the Third Reich.

"Hitler was the standard-bearer in the fight against communism, and the international right had to support him - which meant massive financing for Nazism to take power in Germany," he said.

.Of course, by the time the CIA memos were made public last year, various writers had spun far more elaborate stories about Hitler’s alleged life in South America.

One self-described historian claimed that Hitler eventually left Argentina for Paraguay and lived there inside an opulent underground Bunker, which was turned into a hotel after his death in 1971.

Yet another researcher claimed that Hitler went to Brazil “hunting for buried treasure using a map given to him by friends within the Vatican,” the "Express" wrote.

The researcher was convinced that Hitler lived in the country until at least 1984, into his 90s, because she had found a grainy photograph of an old man taken that year and was reminded of Hitler when she used Photoshop to add a mustache to it.

5. Hitler escaped to a secret Antarctic base, but don’t worry — we nuked it

In a particularly imaginative variation of the basic submarine escape story, a faction of theorists claim that Hitler’s U-Boat detoured to Antarctica, depositing the leader at a secret Nazi ice base before continuing to South America with his lesser officers.

“The proposed location for the Nazi base [often a cavern under the ice] has wandered around over most of the Norwegian Antarctic territory of Dronning Maud Land" "Nature" once wrote of this theory. “And it’s not agreed whether the submarines were carrying Hitler himself, or just his ashes".

Did Hitler have a Base in the Antarctic?
John Whitfield
Nature
30 March 2007

After the initial flurry of interest, International Polar Year [IPY] seems to have gone a bit quiet. I propose pepping things up with a good conspiracy theory.

Handily, a recent paper in "Polar Record" describes one. The Nazis, some believe, established a secret base in Antarctica to which they spirited Hitler at the war's end, fought off British special forces and an American military taskforce, partly by shooting down US planes using flying saucers. The Americans eventually destroyed the base with nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Since then, various governments have striven to conceal this.

In this light, it's no effort to re-imagine Antarctic explorations proposed under the aegis of IPY. A quick tour of the website reveals a project entitled "Exploring Antarctic Dry Valleys in Preparation for Mars Landings".. It seems scarcely less unlikely that this could really be a mission to recover Nazi treasure or technologies.

Like all good conspiracy theories, this one is built on a skeleton of facts. There was a German expedition to Antarctica in 1938-39. There was classified British military activity in Antarctica during the war. In July 1945, two months after VE Day, the German submarine U-530 appeared at the Argentine naval base of Mar del Plata. The next month, U-977 did the same.

In 1946-47 the US military mounted Operation Highjump, the largest ever Antarctic expedition, consisting of 4,700 men and 13 ships. And in 1958, they carried out three nuclear explosions in the southern hemisphere that were meant to stay secret, but didn't.

Dashed Debunking

However, when you see a paper titled "Hitler's Antarctic base: the myth and the reality," you know that reality is going to disappoint. Using documentary evidence and first-hand experience of Antarctica, Colin Summerhayes of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK, and Toronto-based Peter Beeching puncture every last bit of the story.

To give just a few of their points: the Germans' pre-war visit to Antarctica, concerned mainly with establishing a whaling base, was fleeting, never spending more than a day on the ice shelf. The wartime British force in Antarctica was tiny, and concerned mainly with observation and securing territorial claims to the islands around the Falklands.

The U-boats were in the southern ocean during the Antarctic winter, when the pack ice would have made it impossible for them to reach the coast. The US atomic tests in the 1950s took place around Tristan da Cunha, thousands of kilometres from Antarctica.

It doesn't help that the various conspiracists haven't got their story straight. The proposed location for the Nazi base (often a cavern under the ice) has wandered around over most of the Norwegian Antarctic territory of Dronning Maud Land. And it's not agreed whether the submarines were carrying Hitler himself, or just his ashes.

Taking 21 peer-reviewed pages to address this looks like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The story ends up being indulged and damned simultaneously, in the same way that highbrow papers report celebrity goings-on by harrumphing over the lowbrow media's obsession with them..

And Summerhayes and Beeching face the problem of all scientists trying to engage with unreason. If the people advancing this kind of stuff — one of whom was recently jailed for holocaust denial — cared about the evidence, they wouldn't be where they are in the first place.

But Summerhayes says that he needed to take a stand. "These theories are incredibly popular among Germans and Russians," he says. "You can either leave it alone, or you can say 'hang on...'."

Debunking the story was "a lot of fun — I became hooked", he says. "I'm using it as an exercise to educate people about Antarctic science." Or at least to raise the icy continent's press exposure.

Attracted to the Fringe

The polar regions are a particularly good spot for a conspiracy theory. Until recently, the people that went there had a habit of not coming back. And when they did, they told stories of unimaginable cold and wind, freezing deserts, strange creatures and mind-boggling hardship. More recently we've witnessed the collapse of thousands of square kilometres of ice shelf and discovered giant underground lakes.

Small wonder that the ice has become a screen on which to project lurid imaginings. If you can imagine Amundsen's expedition eating their huskies at 40 below, it's not such a stretch to picture Adolf and Eva chipping ice from the walls of their lair to chill their G 'n' Ts. Lob in some UFOs, and all that's missing for the perfect contemporary myth is a link to 9/11.

Polar myth-making has gone on for centuries. The Greeks and medieval Europeans imagined Thule, a land off the northern edge of the map. Off the top of my head, I can think of Frankenstein pursuing his monster to the Arctic, Superman's Arctic fortress of solitude, and the secret alien Antarctic bases in the "X Files" movie and "Alien vs Predator". There's an evening I'll not get back.

Many of the world's pollutants concentrate in the polar regions, carried there by wind and ocean currents. For some reason something similar seems to happen with our fantasies.

In any case, the story goes, Hitler’s presence in Antarctica explains secretive British and U.S. military missions to the continent in the aftermath of World War II — culminating in a nuclear attack on the Nazi ice base in the 1950s.

None of this is true, of course. Or at least, so claimed two researchers in 2007, when they wrote a 21-page peer-reviewed paper attempting to debunk the notion of a Nazi ice base in Antarctica.

As we said above, the French researchers who claim to have autopsied Hitler’s bones are not the first to hope that science can finally lay him to rest.

And they probably won’t be the last. See also:

6. Moon-Hitler

He’s watching.

Did Hitler have a Base in the Antarctic?
John Whitfield
Nature
30 March 2007

After the initial flurry of interest, International Polar Year [IPY] seems to have gone a bit quiet. I propose pepping things up with a good conspiracy theory.

Handily, a recent paper in "Polar Record" describes one. The Nazis, some believe, established a secret base in Antarctica to which they spirited Hitler at the war's end, fought off British special forces and an American military taskforce, partly by shooting down US planes using flying saucers. The Americans eventually destroyed the base with nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Since then, various governments have striven to conceal this.

In this light, it's no effort to re-imagine Antarctic explorations proposed under the aegis of IPY. A quick tour of the website reveals a project entitled "Exploring Antarctic Dry Valleys in Preparation for Mars Landings".. It seems scarcely less unlikely that this could really be a mission to recover Nazi treasure or technologies.

Like all good conspiracy theories, this one is built on a skeleton of facts. There was a German expedition to Antarctica in 1938-39. There was classified British military activity in Antarctica during the war. In July 1945, two months after VE Day, the German submarine U-530 appeared at the Argentine naval base of Mar del Plata. The next month, U-977 did the same.

In 1946-47 the US military mounted Operation Highjump, the largest ever Antarctic expedition, consisting of 4,700 men and 13 ships. And in 1958, they carried out three nuclear explosions in the southern hemisphere that were meant to stay secret, but didn't.

Dashed Debunking

However, when you see a paper titled "Hitler's Antarctic base: the myth and the reality," you know that reality is going to disappoint. Using documentary evidence and first-hand experience of Antarctica, Colin Summerhayes of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK, and Toronto-based Peter Beeching puncture every last bit of the story.

To give just a few of their points: the Germans' pre-war visit to Antarctica, concerned mainly with establishing a whaling base, was fleeting, never spending more than a day on the ice shelf. The wartime British force in Antarctica was tiny, and concerned mainly with observation and securing territorial claims to the islands around the Falklands.

The U-Boats were in the southern ocean during the Antarctic winter, when the pack ice would have made it impossible for them to reach the coast. The US atomic tests in the 1950s took place around Tristan da Cunha, thousands of kilometres from Antarctica.

It doesn't help that the various conspiracists haven't got their story straight. The proposed location for the Nazi base [often a cavern under the ice] has wandered around over most of the Norwegian Antarctic territory of Dronning Maud Land.

And it's not agreed whether the submarines were carrying Hitler himself, or just his ashes.

Taking 21 peer-reviewed pages to address this looks like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The story ends up being indulged and damned simultaneously, in the same way that highbrow papers report celebrity goings-on by harrumphing over the lowbrow media's obsession with them..

And Summerhayes and Beeching face the problem of all scientists trying to engage with unreason. If the people advancing this kind of stuff — one of whom was recently jailed for holocaust denial — cared about the evidence, they wouldn't be where they are in the first place.

But Summerhayes says that he needed to take a stand. "These theories are incredibly popular among Germans and Russians," he says. "You can either leave it alone, or you can say 'hang on...'."

Debunking the story was "a lot of fun — I became hooked", he says. "I'm using it as an exercise to educate people about Antarctic science." Or at least to raise the icy continent's press exposure.

Attracted to the Fringe

The polar regions are a particularly good spot for a conspiracy theory. Until recently, the people that went there had a habit of not coming back. And when they did, they told stories of unimaginable cold and wind, freezing deserts, strange creatures and mind-boggling hardship. More recently we've witnessed the collapse of thousands of square kilometres of ice shelf and discovered giant underground lakes.

Small wonder that the ice has become a screen on which to project lurid imaginings. If you can imagine Amundsen's expedition eating their huskies at 40 below, it's not such a stretch to picture Adolf and Eva chipping ice from the walls of their lair to chill their G 'n' Ts. Lob in some UFOs, and all that's missing for the perfect contemporary myth is a link to 9/11.

Polar myth-making has gone on for centuries. The Greeks and medieval Europeans imagined Thule, a land off the northern edge of the map. Off the top of my head, I can think of Frankenstein pursuing his monster to the Arctic, Superman's Arctic fortress of solitude, and the secret alien Antarctic bases in the "X Files" movie and "Alien vs Predator". There's an evening I'll not get back.

Many of the world's pollutants concentrate in the polar regions, carried there by wind and ocean currents. For some reason something similar seems to happen with our fantasies.