Hitler's Final Days in the Bunker

Jewish Telegraphic Agency 
17 March 1993 

PARIS: French coroners have reportedly proved that a corpse which Soviet authorities said in 1945 was that of Adolf Hitler was in fact that of someone else.

Four forensic specialists, who wrote up this finding in the journal "Semaine en Hopitaux" [Hospital Week], base their theory on careful examination of documents prepared by the Soviet army coroners who performed the autopsy on that body on 8 May 1945.

The doctors, who work at the Lille Institute for Social and Legal Medicine, write that the real body of Hitler was in fact discovered by the Soviets at the end of May 1945.

It was “shown in a wood near Berlin to Harry Mengershausen, the last German soldier to have seen it in the garden of the [Berlin] Chancery.

“Mengershausen, in spite of the body’s advanced state of decay, identified the corpse as that of Hitler”, they write.

The skull of that body had a hole in the right temple, in keeping with the belief that Hitler shot himself in the head.

Hitler left a will, dated 29 April 1945, saying that his and his bride Eva Braun’s wish was to “die and be cremated right away".

The next day at 3:30 p.m., Hitler and Braun allegedly committed suicide in his Bunker below the chancery. Their bodies were said to have been sprayed with gasoline and burned, and the charred remnants were reportedly buried in a nearby excavation.

A few days later, the Soviet army exhumed corpses from the garden of the Berlin Chancery. The most charred body was assumed to be Hitler’s.

Soviet army Col. Dr. Faust Shkarawsky  performed an autopsy on the corpse together with three other Soviet forensic specialists. Their report, signed 11 May, 1945, clearly depicts a “mock autopsy” performed on orders, the French coroners write.

This was done, the French doctors say, to assuage Josef Stalin, who was demanding to see Hitler’s corpse at once.

The French coroners write that in this way Stalin was provided with an immediate, plausible Hitler.

Two questions remain to be solved: whose corpse was taken to Moscow and shown to Stalin? And where is the actual corpse of Hitler?

Recently, the director of the Russian National Archive told journalists that Hitler’s skull is kept in Moscow.

The same information was provided 40 years ago by a member of Hitler’s entourage, German army officer Karl Schneider, according to the French daily "Le Monde".

The French coroners — Eric Laurier, Valery Hedouin, Didier Gosset and Pierre Henri Muller — would now like to see the skull that is kept in Moscow.

But where is the skull of Adolf Hitler?
A skull fragment believed to have belonged to Adolf Hitler is actually that of an unidentified woman, according to an American study that revives the debate around the death of the Nazi dictator.
29 September 2009

The piece of skull was first exposed by the Department of Archives in Moscow in 2000. The Russians claim to also hold the jaw of Hitler .

The bone, pierced by a bullet, fueled the thesis that Hitler committed suicide in his Bunker in Berlin at the arrival of Soviet troops in April 1945. Doubts about the sequence of events -and even speculation about a possible flight of the "Führer"-  persisted for decades.

A new study by professors from the University of Connecticut [Northeast] could well revive speculation about a possible flight of the "Führer".  The latter assure that their analyzes show that the skull is that of a woman, between 20 and 40 years old.

Archaeologist and human bones specialist Nick Bellantoni says he immediately thought it was a woman because of the structure of the skull.  The director of the University of Connecticut's genetic research center, Linda Strausbaugh, then agreed to carry out DNA research.  The results of the analyzes carried out in May on a collection of the skull are without appeal: "The DNA tells us that it is about a woman" declared Linda Strausbaugh on 28 September .  This revelation is the subject of a documentary broadcast on the History Channel entitled "Hitler's Flight ", which again puts forward the idea that the dictator was able to flee Berlin.

The researcher explains that the analysis does not prove anything about Hitler's fate and merely asserts that the skull is not his.  Christopher Browning, a Holocaust historian and professor at the University of North Carolina [Southeast}, points out that these results do not change the historical consensus.  Historians do not rely solely on reports of the Soviet army, he says, they had access to other stories, such as notes from the British Secret Service.

"Whether the skeleton or skull in the possession of the Russians belongs to Hitler or not does not change history," says Professor Browning.

In fact, even in Moscow, some scientists have already expressed doubts about the origin of the skull fragment.

It has always been presented as "probably belonging to Hitler, " said  the Deputy head of state archives Vladimir Kozlov.

And the discovery of the American scientists is "inconsequential," he says, on the interpretation of historical facts: "The identification of the skull does not matter. The finding on the death of Hitler was made a before the discovery of the skull fragments ".

One question remains unanswered: who owns the skull of Moscow?

According to Ms. Strausbaugh, if DNA samples from relatives of the dead in the Bunker could be obtained, a little clarity could be made. But for now, its identity remains an enigma.

-- AFP source

 

Russia Casts Doubt on Hitler Skull Theory in Apparent Cover-Up ... Arranged by Whom?
Russia has questioned the credibility of new research claiming Adolf Adolf Hitler may have escaped at the end of the Second World War.
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow
29 September 2009

Officials in Moscow say they have no record of a US researcher who claims to have examined a skull fragment said to belong to the late Nazi dictator.

Russia responded after a History Channel documentary claimed to have subjected the bone, which is kept in Moscow, to DNA testing and discovered it belonged to a woman and not Adolf Hitler.

The program suggested its findings bolstered the theory that Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in 1945 as is widely thought.

But Vladimir Kozlov, deputy director of Russia's state archive where the fragment is stored, has cast doubt on the programme. He says he has no record that an American scientist called Nick Bellantoni who is shown in the program taking samples from the skull had ever been granted access.

"Nobody with that name – Bellantoni – has been into the archive for the last four years," he told state news agency "RIA Novosti". "None of the directors or people who grant permission for this kind of thing know this name".

In the program, Dr Bellantoni is shown handling what looks like the skull fragment and removing five small pieces to take away for tests. But Mr Kozlov said no archivist would have allowed the American scientist to do this.

Even if the skull fragment does turn out to be that of a woman, Mr Kozlov said it would not undermine the accepted version of Adolf Hitler's death anyway. The definitive piece of evidence is a portion of Adolf Hitler's jawbone, also stored in Moscow, he added.

In the program, the narrator says Dr Bellantoni won access to the Russian archive after "heated negotiations". He is seen entering the archive, leafing through a Soviet-era file on Adolf Hitler's death, and examining a bloodied piece of Adolf Hitler's sofa along with the contested skull fragment. He tells viewers that he has only been given one hour in the archive. Soviet forces say they found the charred remains of Adolf Hitler's corpse in the ruins of Berlin in 1945. But theories that Adolf Hitler escaped and that the remains belonged to a doppelganger have failed to die.

Lynn Gardner, a spokeswoman for the History Channel, insisted the program makers did access the archives. She said a named witness could support this and that they had a receipt for the money they had paid to film inside the archive.

"We have documentation of this access," she said. "We take every possible measure to ensure the accuracy of our product".
 

Hitler Died Peacefully in His Bed in Argentina?

The death of Adolf Hitler still remains one of the biggest mysteries in history. There are numerous theories that mostly come down to speculation that the Nazi leader didn’t die in his bunker, but managed to escape and hide. He allegedly was hiding for years and peacefully died in his own bed.

A few days ago scientists received the evidence that these theories might not be that far from truth. The scull fragment that was thought to be Hitler’s turned out to be the remains of a woman.

For a long time historians believed that the fragment proved that on 30 April, 1945, the Führer took a cyanide pill and shot his head off when he realized that the Third Reich was over. His mistress Eva Braun committed suicide in the same bunker.

According to numerous witnesses, their bodies were wrapped in blankets and taken out of the bunker to a nearby garden. The bodies were soaked with Petroleum, set on fire, and later buried. In 1945, Soviet special agents excavated the place of a likely burial and found the bones that were believed to be Hitler’s.
 
A part of the skull was missing, which showed that the death was caused by a bullet. The preserved jaw fragment coincided with the dental records found at the office of Hitler’s dentist. A year later, the missing fragment was found by the order of Stalin who had suspicions that Hitler managed to escape and hide.

Is it believable that:

a) It was possible to miss something as significant as Hitler's skull, the first time around.
b) That Stalin et al would not have had every inch of that locale searched the first time around.
c) That it would take them the best part of a year to realize that they should have looked closer.
d) That they could return a year later and actually find his skull when it was nowhere to be found, previously.  

In the mid 1950s, after Stalin’s death, the skeleton that was presumably Hitler’s was buried in Magdeburg, East Germany. In 1970, the skeleton was dug out by the KGB agents.

Only the jawbone, the skull fragment and the bloodstained sofa segments were preserved. The findings were sent to the KGB archives.

American specialists examined the bone fragments. According to Connecticut archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, the bone seemed very thin, male bone tends to be more robust. Besides, thesutures where the skull plates come together seemed to correspond to someone under 40. In 1945 Hitler turned 56.

Bellantoni believes that the studied bone fragment could not belong to Eva Braun either, although she died at 33. "There is no report of Eva Braun having shot herself or having been shot afterwards. It could be anyone. Many people were killed around the bunker area,” the scientist said.

Nick Bellantoni received the bone tissue that was believed to belong to Hitler in Moscow, where the fragments were kept in the Russian State Archives and even displayed at an exhibition in 2000.

The researcher was shown the bloodstained upholstery from the Bunker sofa which was believed to be Hitler’s and Braun’s deathbed.

"I had the reference photos the Soviets took of the sofa in 1945 and I was seeing the exact same stains on the fragments of wood and fabric in front of me, so I knew I was working with the real thing," said the archeologists. The results of the research will be used as the basis for the US documentary "Hitler's Escape".
 
Bellantoni was allowed only one hour in the archives, during which time he applied cotton swabs and took DNA samples that were sent to Connecticut right away. Linda Strausbaugh closed her lab for three days to work exclusively on the Hitler project.

"We used the same routines and controls that would have been used in a crime lab," she said. To her surprise, a small amount of viable DNA was extracted.

"We were very lucky to get a reading, despite the limited amount of genetic information," the scientist said. “That’s how we found out that the fragment belongs to a female.”

The story of the Nazi leader’s death is still a mystery. Some scientists initially had doubts about his suicide and believed it was Nazi’s propaganda created to present his suicide in a suitably heroic light.

Abel Basti, an Argentinean writer, was one of the first people to believe that the jaw fragment must be DNA-tested.

He explained that the scientists only had a chance to compare the charred jaw fragment with poor quality X-Rays and the testimony of Hitler’s dentist who could have lied. He believed that the scientists should compare his DNA samples with the samples of Hitler’s sister Paula who passed away in 1960 and was buried at the Bergfriedhof cemetery.

Abel Basti is the author of the book Hitler in Argentina that describes his theory of Hitler’s escape based on the real documents and photographs from archives. The writer believes that Hitler managed to escape to South America and live a long life.

In his book Basti states that on April 29, 1945 the Nazi leader was flown from Berlin to Spain on a Messerschmitt Me 262. From Spain, accompanied by Eva Braun, he went to Argentina by a submarine.

---

Ksenia Obraztsova
Pravda.Ru
2 October 2009

 

The Truth About Hitler's Skull
Eils Lotozo
5 October 2009

When cinematographer Jonathan Miller '01 shot an episode of the new History Channel series“Mystery Quest” he didn't expect it to become an international incident and fodder for a Letterman monologue. But that's just what happened.

---

Cinematographer Jonathan Miller  '01 was in Berlin with a production crew in April shooting an episode of the series“Mystery Quest” about the doubt and speculation that has swirled around accounts of Hitler's suicide during the Russian bombardment of 1945. On their list of tantalizing clues to examine for the show were skull and jawbone fragments, purportedly from Hitler's skull, that were housed in Moscow's State Archive. It wasn't clear, though, if they would be allowed in to see the bones. But the team got lucky. "At the last minute, one of our historian contacts in Russia said he could get access to the skull," says Miller.

After a last minute scramble for Visas, the team traveled to Moscow with University of Connecticut archaeologist and bone expert Nick Bellantoni, who performed a DNA test on the skull. The results of the investigation aired in an episode titled Hitler's Escape on September  16  with a dramatic“reveal” at the show's end.  According to Bellantoni and a team of fellow forensic experts, the skull belonged not to Hitler, but to a woman between 20 and 40 years old.

It's been big news ever since. 

A miffed Russian government  is disputing that the“Mystery Quest” crew ever even visited the facility, while the History Channel has rebutted with evidence of contracts and receipts for a location fee.

David Letterman worked a few jokes about the controversy into a recent late-night monologue.

“I wasn't even sure the DNA test would work,” says Miller, who shot footage for the show of Bellantoni handling the skull fragment.  [The scientist also got to examine the blood-stained couch on which Hitler supposedly shot himself after swallowing a cyanide pill]]. The condition of the skull was terrible and it could have been contaminated. That they actually got something waspretty amazing.”

Miller, who has also shot a“Mystery Quest” show on the Amityville horror and another about the organization Odessa which smuggled Nazis out of Germany after the war, says the revelations about the skull and the furor that has ensued have been a major surprise.  Says Miller,“It's been a pretty crazy adventure".

 

The battle around the remains of Adolf Hitler continues
Jim Jarrassé
Le Figaro
15 December 2009

In September, American researchers questioned the Russians' claim that they were in possession of the Führer's bones.  Until Moscow replied by unveiling new items last week.

On one side the Russians, on the other the Americans.  At the center of the battle, a question: what happened to the remains of Adolf Hitler?  Nearly 65 years after the death of the Führer, the question remains unresolved.

 For Moscow, no hesitation.  According to the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service, which replaced the KGB, the Russians have always been in possession of Hitler's remains.  In April 2000, an exhibition in the Russian capital presented for the first time a skull fragment of the Nazi leader.  At the time, Sergei Mironenko, head of the Russian archives, ensured that the bullet-holed bone was authentic.

History tells us that Adolf Hitler ended his life on 30 April 1945 in the Berlin Bunker where he had taken refuge by swallowing a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head.  His body was then taken to the open air, in the gardens of the Chancellery, then thrown into a crater shell and sprinkled with gasoline.  This is where the Red Army soldiers would have picked up his remains five days later.  The Soviets have also seized the remains of Eva Braun, the wife of Adolf Hitler, and Josef Göbbels, head of Nazi propaganda.

According to the Russians, in February 1946, the three bodies were secretly buried by a group of KGB special agents on a Soviet military field in Magdeburg, because in March 1970, the Soviets must abandon this area to the East German authorities.

In Moscow, the fear of seeing Hitler's burial place become a place of worship for the nostalgia of Nazism is growing.  KGB leader Yuri Andropov then decides to conduct a secret operation to destroy the bones.  On 4 April 1970, agents secretly entered the military field and unearthed the bodies before burning them.  "The ashes were thrown into the Biederitz River, 11 kilometers from Magdeburg," Vassili Khristoforov, the current head of the FSB's archives, told Reuters last week in an interview with the Russian news agency Interfax.

 Hitler's skull would be that of a woman

Everything would have disappeared from the East German terrain, with two exceptions: the famous fragment of skull and a piece of jaw Führer, which the KGB would have chosen to keep in its archives in Moscow.  "These remains are unique," says Vassili Khristoforov.  "This is the only evidence of this type of Hitler's death, and that's why the FSB keeps them in his archives."

But the Russian version, though credible, was questioned last September by American scientists.  Researchers at the University of Connecticut conducted a series of analyzes in Moscow on the skull fragment believed to have belonged to Adolf Hitler, including DNA samples from the bone.  The result of the analysis is surprising: for Americans, this skull is actually that of a woman aged 20 to 40 years.

This revelation discredits the thesis of the Russians.  But it also negates the only evidence that Hitler actually shot himself in the head, and could revive all the fanciful theories.  Some have long suggested that the Führer may not have died in his Bunker.

The Russians persist.  Intelligence services question the results of the US researchers accused of working without authorization.  "They did not go to the FSB archives to do a DNA analysis," General Khristoforov said last week.  "And even if they had obtained DNA from our fragments, with what could they have compared it?"

The in-depth study of Hitler's alleged jawbone, still preserved in Moscow and to which American scientists had no access, could bring new elements.  The FSB already ensures that analyzes have been performed and has established the correspondence between the jaw piece and the dental identity of Adolf Hitler.  Why revive a debate that has already lasted more than half a century.
 

Where did Hitler's remains go?
Sputnik
7 October.2016

 On March 13, 1970, Yuri Andropov sent a letter to Leonid Brezhnev suggesting that he destroy Hitler's body.  The Soviet leader then gave the green light to a secret operation called "Archive".

Why ?

 But why seek to destroy the bones of Hitler, 24 years after his burial?  The explanation is simple: after the dissolution of a Soviet garrison on the territory of Magdeburg, handed over to the German authorities and developed, the builders could have found the remains and identify - which could potentially trigger a media bomb and cause a semi-religious neo-Nazism.

 An idea from the director of the KGB

 Yuri Andropov
 
Operation "Archive" was initiated by Yuri Andropov, then director of the KGB.  He proceeded to the destruction of Hitler's bones in perfect conformity with the concept of a "blocking beam" - which it is enough to remove to eliminate congestion.  In his youth, Andropov worked in timber mills and knew the method.  In this case, the clutter could have appeared simply because for several years it was said that Hitler was alive, which irritated the Soviet authorities, from Stalin to Brezhnev.

 Before "Archive"

The bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun had already been displaced several times after they were found on 4 May 1945 near the entrance to Hitler's Bunker.  They were first buried in Buch, near Berlin, where they were found by the SMERSH men of the 3rd Shock Army.  When the army had to change position, the bodies were exhumed and transported to Rathenow.

To both find and hide the place, they planted pines.  On 13 January 1946, the bodies were secretly transported to Magdeburg and buried in the courtyard of the N36 house in Westendstrasse, where the military counter-Intelligence office was located.  In the same place Göbbels, his wife and their six children .were buried

Was it Hitler?

 Discussions that in the 1970s Soviet agents did not spread the right ashes do not stop.  To this day, there are still newspapers in which an elderly Latin American woman specifically tells that a "mustached" Hiler-like man came to her village when she was a girl, that she visited him with her friends and that he gave them German sweets.  Another conspiracy myth is the story of Hitler's presence in Antarctica.  According to this story, he hid in Antarctic bases under the ice.  A very harmful myth: considering the association between ice and eternity, it is a fertile ground for thinking that the Führer is still alive.  In 1970, Andropov understood that it was dangerous to feed the media rumors.

 The cover

 The story invented on the cover for the operational group gathered by Andropov was the information received from a so-called dangerous criminal captured in the USSR.  According to this "criminal", important archival documents had been buried in Magdeburg.

This legend was perfectly plausible and easy to execute.  The task group went to Magdeburg and settled in a tent.  First guarded by soldiers, it was then monitored by KGB agents when digging.  An observation post was installed remotely to monitor the operation.  Excavations took place at night.

Highly secretive defense

Brezhnev responded to Andropov's letter three days later.  The operation was classified as a very secret defense.  Four people knew about it: Leonid Brezhnev, Alexey Kosygin, Nikolai Podgorny and Yuri Andropov.  The "Archive" files were classified K, that is, they could not be transmitted to a liaison officer or a secretary or sent by the special post: they had to be sent directly.  The document was brought from Brezhnev by the head of the first sector of the General Bureau of the CPSU Central Committee, that is to say, a very competent person.  A leak was not an option - and it did not happen.  Everything went smoothly.  The proceedings were drafted in a single copy and sent to Moscow at the KGB.

Act [single copy]

 According to the "Archive" activity plan approved by the KGB President at the USSR Council of Ministers on 26 March 1970, the operational group consisting of Chief 00 KGB Unit 92626 Colonel N. Kovalenko and Operational Officers of the same service [names omitted] proceeded to the exhumation of the remains of war criminals on the territory of the garrison at Westendstrasse near the house N36 [today Klausenerstrasse].

The exhumation showed that the bones of the war criminals had been supposedly buried in five boxes of wood placed one over the other in cross.  Three of them from north to south, the other two from east to west.  The crates rotted to turn into dust, the bones mixed with the earth.  While digging the soil it was meticulously observed and the remains [skulls, shins, ribs, vertebrae, etc.] were placed in a box.  The level of degradation was high, especially that of the bodies of children, and did not allow an accurate account of the discovery.

Depending on the number of shins and skull, the remains could belong to 10 or 11 bodies.  After the extraction of the remains, the place was restored to its original state.  The exhumation operation was carried out during the night and the morning of 4 April 1970. The observation of the house adjacent to the site of the operation, where German citizens lived, revealed no suspicious activity on their part. .  No direct interest was shown for the work done or for the tent installed on the site of the excavations.  The box containing the remains of the war criminals was placed under the protection of the operational agents until the morning of 5 April, when the physical destruction of the remains took place.
 

The Incredible story of Hitler’s Skull
24 April 2017 

We all know how Russia loves Propaganda, without missing a chance to glorify their army, and most of all their WWII resolution. If about Stalin we can be pretty sure that he’s dead, having his body exposed in a mausoleum, about Adolf Hitler the story is just a bit different. After all kind of movie scenarios, with him escaping the Bunker and later on Germany, reaching South America by submarine, and there living in some kind of "SS Heaven", another story continues to pop-up.

This time it’s about more solid evidence and a straighter question.

”Some historians expressed doubt that the Führer had shot himself, speculating that accounts of Hitler’s death had been embellished to present his suicide in a suitably heroic light. But a fragment of skull, complete with bullet hole, which was taken from the Bunker by the Russians and displayed in Moscow in 2000, appeared to settle the argument".

-- "The Guardian"

So, this skull fragment pops up, and the Russians are claiming that it is the ”ultimate relic”.

According to witnesses, the bodies of Hitler and Braun had been wrapped in blankets and carried to the garden just outside the Berlin Bunker, placed in a bomb crater, doused with Petrol and set ablaze, so where does the skull fragment comes from?

”For decades after the war the fate of Hitler’s corpse was shrouded in secrecy. No picture or film was made public. As the Soviet Army secured control of Berlin in May 1945, Russian forensic specialists under the command of the counter-Intelligence unit SMERSH [an acronym for “Death to Spies”] dug up what was presumed to be the dictator’s body outside the Bunker and performed a post-mortem examination behind closed doors. A part of the skull was absent, presumably blown away by Hitler’s suicide shot, but what remained of his jaw coincided with his dental records, a fact reportedly confirmed when the Russians showed his surviving dental work to the captured assistants of Hitler’s dentist. The autopsy also reported that Hitler, as had been rumored, had only one testicle".

-- "The Guardian"

Samples of the skull were sent for testing in Connecticut, in order to put an end to this debate, and understand if the human remains found in 1946, reopening a hole located in front of the Bunker’s exit, could clearly be connected to Hitler.  The results confirmed without doubt that DNA coming from the skull examined, incontestably belonged to a woman. The only certain thing is that we still don’t know what exactly happened in that Bunker, after 70 years from the facts.
 

Russia ready to provide Hitler’s skull to scrutinize its authenticity
A slew of conspiracy theories circulating suggest that Hitler did not commit suicide in 1945, but rather fled to South America or elsewhere and that the skull is not authentic

MOSCOW, 28 April 2017 /TASS/. The Russian State Archive is ready to furnish the skull of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler for any examination to prove its authenticity, its director Larisa Rogova told TASS on Friday.

"An English company contacted us a short while ago. They said they had found Hitler’s nephew who is ready for genetic tests," Rogova said.

She added that the examination should be carried out by Russian specialists if the Investigative Committee grants permission.

A slew of conspiracy theories circulating suggest that Hitler did not commit suicide in 1945, but rather fled to South America or elsewhere and that the skull is not authentic.

"The skull is genuine, it has been proven," Rogova said, adding that the skull is put on display from time to time.

 

There was not just an improvised landing-strip on the Charlottenburger Chaussee, now Strasse des 17. Juni, but a functional, fully operational, completely equipped military airfield Berlin-Tiergarten with most likely several runways. An airfield where aircraft like Fw-200 and Ju-290 etc were also able to land and to be handled, and to take-off again, exposed to enemy-fire, of course. And this capacity has been and is still being intentionally down-played.

The building of the Reichstag wasn't anything else but a ruin, already burnt-out in 1933. The Nazis disliked the German parliament. German defence of the Reichstag-building was relatively weak, compared to the defence of the Ost-West-Achse and the defence of the trees of an urban park with no people and no important office, the Tiergarten. The Germans defended their trees in the park until the very last moment. The entire vegetation was eventually destroyed, the Tiergarten a desert with almost no trees after the war as a result of these fights. Still on 1 May 1945, the entire Ost-West-Achse was still in German hands, not yet crossed by any Soviet soldier.
The Grosser Stern with the Siegessäule on the Ost-West-Achse, a dead monument, fell in the morning of 2 May 1945, almost simultaneously with the Reichskanzlei plus Bunker, 2.5 km away.

But only as Food for Thoughts, pretending nothing ... does anyone see any reason why the Germans were desperately defending a long and straight street across an urban park, and with trees right and left but no buildings, when the entire city was already lost with the exception of the Reichskanzlei and the Flak-Bunker Zoo which was also defending the Ost-West-Achse, 36 hours after the Reichstag fell on 30 April 1945 ? Officially, the Ost-West-Achse, 2 km long, was  not ever that important, but it had been defended until the very end. How many unknown soldiers, Polish, German, Soviet, died in these last 36 hours in this last battle? Fighting desperately for one long and unimportant street across an urban park. And no photograph for Stalin. Makes me just wonder ...

 

Exerpt from
Did Hitler Die In The Bunker? by Eric Frattini
Between the truth, the legend and the fiction
28 September 2015

When I began preparing the documentation to write the novel "El Oro de Mefisto" in 2009 I found the first documents that spoke of an alleged flight of Adolf Hitler from the Bunker of the Chancellery in the last days of World War II.

The simple official papers  spoke of a Legend I had heard countless times and the only thing I thought was to include Hitler's flight from the Bunker as a secondary story in my novel, and in the context of fiction. Documents signed by such persons as J. Edgar Hoover -FBI Director between 1935 and 1972 - Dwight D. Eisenhower -military governor of the American Allied Occupation Zone in Germany between May and November 1945- and Marshal Georgi Zhukov himself -Conqueror of Berlin- claimed that Hitler could have escaped from the Soviet siege to the capital of the Third Reich in April 1945. While creating the plot of fiction around Hitler's flight I found real documents with real characters such as Hanna Reitsch, Peter Erich Baumgart, Martin Bormann, Heinz Schäffer, Otto Wermuth, Michael Musmanno, Gustav Weler, actors who were forming a plot whose reality undoubtedly surpassed the fiction I was creating.

Otto Wermuth joined the Kriegsmarine in 1939. He served on the destroyer Z 23 from March to April 1941. He joined the U-Boat force in April and began his training.

After completing training he joined the U-37 as a Watch Officer in September 1941. The hugely successful U-37 was by that time retired to school boat duties and Wermuth did not go out on patrol with it. In July 1942 Otto Wermuth became the Second Watch Officer on the successful U-103, staying in that role until June 1943 when he became the First Watch Officer until February 1944. He served on the U-103 during 3 patrols, total of over 150 days at sea. During his time on the U-103 the boat sank 3 ships.

Otto Wermuth went through U-Boat commander training from March to July 1944. He took command of the U-853 on 10 July for a short while, leaving command on 31 August.

He was then assigned to the 1. UAA and as a supernumerary Watch Officer on the U-530 from 14 September to January 1945.

Surrender of his U-boat to Argentina

The 24 year-old Oblt. Otto Wermuth became commander of the U-530 in January 1945 and took the boat on what was to become one of the more special patrols of the war. On 3 March 1945 he left Horten, Norway for a patrol intended to hunt off Halifax, Canada. Finding little there he headed south to New York waters. From May 4 to 7 U-530 fired 9 torpedoes at Allied shipping off New York but they all missed or malfunctioned. When Wermuth then learned of the German surrender he decided to flee to Argentina and all but a few enlisted man approved the idea. He jettisoned the remaining 5 torpedoes and headed south the Atlantic and surrendered his boat to the Argentinian navy on 10 July 1945 after 130 days at sea

Even though the boat was a normal combat boat, empty of armaments and secret materials the press soon began to wonder amazing things about this patrols. Martin Bormann, Eva Braun,Hitler himself and others were at one time or another believed to have been on board. Some still believe this. No evidence has ever come forth for any of this

Sources

Blair, C. [1998]. Hitler’s U-Boat War. The Hunted, 1942-1945.
Busch, R & Röll, H-J. [1998]. German U-Boat commanders of World War II.

Most people are widely familiar with Adolf Hitler's "Last Days" official history, which was screened through the German production "Der Untergang" [Downfal]l directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel and based on the book of the same title written by the great German historian Joachim Fest.

What people did not know was that "official history" could have become a political fiction and that the result had been a deliberately planned history by the victorious powers.

Here the words of Winston Churchill that "history is written by the victors" had never been more real than in the death of Hitler.

As the war drew to a close, Prime Minister Churchill and the British government had to make sure that history was never going to happen again, that there would be no resurgence of German National Socialism by dictating the end of the Third Reich's history.

The story was to be so little edifying as to permanently tarnish the prestige of the regime in the eyes of even its most ardent supporters. Neither British nor Americans really showed any interest in Hitler's true destiny.

Its only interest was to assign to the leader of the Nazi movement the most ignoble exit of the historical stage.

In this sense, the image of Hitler's charred corpse in the crater of a bomb in the Chancellery's garden as if it were "scattered garbage," as Michael Musmanno, a judge at the Nuremberg Trials, said, worked perfectly as a metaphor with the slogan "The passage of the regime of Adolf Hitler to the "dustbin of history".

But if something I have learned in my years as a file mouse searching and searching some official document, is that everything -absolutely everything- is written and that writing will one day be found.

The writer Umberto Eco, in his magnificent book "Confessions of a Young Novelist" [2011], speaks of the supposed flight of Hitler from a very interesting point of view. Eco says:

"So, let me use the expression 'encyclopedic truths' for all elements of common knowledge that emerge in an encyclopedia [such as the distance from Earth to the Sun or the fact that Hitler died in the Bunker]. I give certain information because I trust the scientific community, and accept a kind of 'division of cultural work' by which I delegate to specialized people the task of demonstrating them".

But encyclopedic statements also have limits. They are subject to revision, for by definition science is always ready to reconsider its own discoveries.

If we keep our minds open, we must be willing to review our views on Hitler's death as soon as new documents are discovered. In fact, the fact that Hitler died in a Bunker has already been called into question by some historians. It is conceivable that Hitler survived the fall of Berlin into the hands of the Allies and escaped to Argentina, that no corpse was burned in the Bunker or that the cremated body was of another, or that Hitler's suicide was invented for propaganda purposes by the Russians who came to the Bunker. Any statement concerning encyclopaedic truths can, and often must, be checked in terms of external empirical legitimacy [according to this, we would say "give me evidence that Hitler actually died in the Bunker"}. Following Eco's theory, I set to work not so much in order to "prove" that Hitler fled the siege of Berlin and of "calling into question" the theory of his suicide. In my search for those documents referred to by the author of "The Name of the Rose", I collided with more than 3,000 pages of the FBI, CIA, NSA, CIC [Military Counterintelligence Corps], MI6, OSS [Office of Strategic Services] , Department of Justice, War Department, Joint Chiefs of Staff, US embassies in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Bogotá and Rio de Janeiro, United Nations Organization, KGB and CEANA [Commission for Clarification of Activities of Nazis in Argentina]. In them they spoke of "Hitler's flight", "Hitler hidden in Argentina", "Rumors that Hitler could be in Argentina", "Hitler seen in Bogota and Brazil", "Report of Hitler and Eva Braun in Argentina" "Hitler is alive," "Adolf Hitler's whereabouts," "Hitler would be in Spain, not Argentina," "Hitler escaped us," and countless more definitions covering ten years of investigations, from 21 September 1945 [supposedly five months after the suicide in the Bunker) until 17 October 1955.

Even the United Nations in a document dated 3 May 1948, entitled 'Is Adolf Hitler dead?' states that "it is the wish of all United Nations investigators to answer this question. Because they have not been able to make clear the disappearance of the German dictator. The truth is that the fascination of National Socialism and the figure of its Führer, is above all the most brutal extermination policy and the most inhuman machinery created for the most horrendous cruelty. If today you ask the people for sure most of them will respond that the reign of the Third Reich was the darkest time in history, ahead of even the Middle Ages or the Inquisition".

"If someone comes to me with reproaches and asks me why I have not resorted to the competent courts of law to judge the guilty, I can only say that at that time I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and for that I was the Supreme Judge of the German people", Hitler himself would say in a speech before the Reichstag.

Today, seven decades after the "Reich of the Thousand Years" was reduced to ashes, the world is still wondering how Germany, a civilized nation made up of civilized people, could accept without any resistance the guilt admitted by a Führer with lots of blood on his hands. How could a nation that had been the cradle of illustrious men like von Humboldt, Beethoven, Mozart, Göthe, Einstein, Mendelsohn, Schumann, Schiller, Planck or Fichte allow barbarism and extermination. Hitler controlled the Reichstag, the Armed Forces, imposed on the media what had to be said and how it should be said, had Germany in a fist, a country of eighty million people, without majority reprimand. Murders were committed by a regime that many of them supported at the polls. The historical admission that a single German together with his small clique could order the deaths of millions of people without making use of the law and without provoking the slightest reaction among the German people, is equivalent for many to a moral accusation against the whole of the German people. Michael Musmanno wrote: "From Bremerhaven to Breslau, from the Saar to East Prussia, I have heard the words: 'They lied to us', 'We were deceived'. These lamentations were not unjustified, the reality was there, but the fraud could have been prevented. Any mayor or councilor, any university professor or head of district, and of course any officer of the Army or Navy, were all responsible to their nation and their people for their failure to do their duty". Germany had been subjugated by an Adolf Hitler who excited the people by claiming that two million Germans killed in World War I could not have done it in vain. "Germany had not lost the war. He had been deceived", Hitler told a gathering of the Nazi Party in Nuremberg.

To answer the question of what place Hitler would occupy in history, one does not have to go to too many encyclopedias to find the answer he gave in 1941 in a letter to Duce Benito Mussolini. "Above all, Duce, it seems to me that the development of mankind was interrupted fifteen hundred years ago, and it is now that he is about to resume his previous path," wrote Hitler. The Nazi leader referred to the year 441 when Attila, at the command of his hordes, was at the height of his power as a conqueror of weaker nations, a treasure trooper, a thief of private property, and a devastator of Europe. Attila was Hitler's idol. Today the Nazi leader is compared to Attila himself, Caligula, Gengis Khan, Kim Il-Sung, Josef Stalin, or Pol Pot;  all are bloodthirsty criminals on whose backs are the systematic murder of millions of human beings. The truth is that the suicide story of Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, in the Chancellery's Bunker was never considered as a historical truth and now, seventy years later, not even as a documented truth.

On 1 May 1945, a day after the alleged suicide of Hitler, the world could only hear this obituary on German radio: "It is reported from the Führer Headquarters that Adolf Hitler has fallen this afternoon at his command post. The Chancellery of the Reich, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and Germany". These were indeed the only words, not confirmed by solid evidence, which gave rise to the rumors and speculations that were spreading exponentially. Different versions appeared on the death of Hitler. In the first instance there was talk of a Führer dying heroically in the fighting in the streets of Berlin and that his body was hidden by his fanatical followers. Another version is that Hitler was killed by his own officers in Berlin. But the most popular story is that Hitler managed to escape Berlin besieged and managed to hide in Paraguay or Argentina, where he lived with his wife Eva Braun until his death in 1962, at the age of 73. If he managed to flee by plane or in a submarine has been, and continues to be, a reason for wide debate. For example, on 26 May 1945, Stalin met with Harry Hopkins, special envoy of President Harry S. Truman, and tells him that "Martin Bormann, Josef Göbbels, Hitler and probably Hans Krebs have escaped and are now hiding". This same version is defended and repeated by the Soviet leader in the following meetings that he has with Truman and Churchill. Two weeks later exactly, on 9 June, it is Marshal Zhukov who repeats Stalin's version of the doubts in Hitler's death. Between 16 July and 2 August 1945, then-Secretary of State James Byrnes, held a chance encounter with Salin during the Potsdam Conference. The American asks the Soviet leader about his opinion regarding the possible flight of Hitler. Stalin responds "I think that Hitler is alive and is very likely to be in Spain or in Argentina". If on 4 May 1945 the Soviet troops allegedly found the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun in the Chancellery's garden, why was Stalin so skeptical?

By the end of 1948, all the material collected by the SMERSH unit, the counter-Intelligence department of the 3rd Soviet Assault Army, whose men were the first to enter the Bunker, was sent from Germany to Moscow, to the 2nd General Department of the Ministry of Security of the State of the Soviet Union, which was in charge of investigating all the facts and events that surrounded the death of the main Nazi leaders. Documents, dentures of the Göbbels, and the most important parts of the jaw and teeth used for the identification of the bodies of Hitler, Eva Braun and others, were filed under the classification of Top Secret. In 1954, Ivan A. Serov, president of the KGB, transferred to the Council of Ministers of the USSR all the materials filed in a special room of the KGB general archive. In 1996, Nikolai D. Kovalyov, director of the Federal Security Service [FSB], gave the order to open to the public documents relating to covert KGB operations, including Operation under the Filename code. The document explained how, in 1970, the then-all-powerful KGB president, Yuri Andropov, ordered the remains of Hitler, Eva Braun and others to be completely destroyed. A special unit of the KGB took out the supposed remains of the Nazi leader who had been buried in an NKVD barracks in Magdeburg [East Germany] in February 1946, burned them and threw the ashes into the waters of the Elbe river, near the city of Biederitz, also in East Germany. But were these the real remains of Hitler and his wife? There is no forensic or documentary evidence that Hitler and Eva Braun died in the Bunker on the last day of April 1945.

The famous fragment of Hitler's skull that were stored by the KGB in Moscow turned out to be those of a woman in her early 40s after a DNA test by a US university. There was not even the possibility that they were the remains of Eva Braun, whose corpse was allegedly cremated alongside Hitler's in the moat of the Chancellery's garden, since the wife of the Führer had died at only 33 years old. Even now it has been shown that Hitler's famous last photograph taken on 20 March 1945, in which he is accompanied by Arthur Axmann, leader of the Hitler Youth and where he surveys a ragged line of young fighters, is not he actually . The old gentleman who touches the cheek of young Wilhelm Hubner was a double, one of the many used by Hitler. The image was analyzed by Alf Linney, a professor at University College London, one of the world's leading facial recognition experts and creator of the best recognition programs currently used by the British and US security forces. The result of his report was that the Hitler, who appeared with his cap plastered and stuffed into a thick coat that Tuesday, 20 March 1945, in the Chancellery's garden, was not really the Führer. Could the memorandum dated 4 September 1944 and addressed to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, entitled "Possible Flight of Adolf Hitler to Argentina"  then be true? 

The document was drafted and sent to the headquarters of the FBI in Washington by General David W. Ladd, military attaché at the US embassy in Buenos Aires. It is a clear analysis of what could have happened in the months following the fall of the Third Reich. In paragraphs 1, 4 and 5 of the document, Ladd states: "Many political observers have expressed the opinion that Adolf Hitler could seek refuge in Argentina after the German collapse. [...] A large healthy German colony in Argentina provides great possibilities to provide a refuge for Hitler and his followers. One of its members, Count Luxburg, has been mentioned as the owner of a ranch that would serve as a refuge. [...]".

By the nature of some plans formulated for the abandonment of Germany after its collapse, it is virtually impossible to substantiate some allegations referring to the Nazis in Argentina after the defeat. However, some importance can be given to the fact that Argentina was silent despite all the accusations that it would serve as the final destination for Hitler after a non-stop flight of 7,376 miles from Berlin in a specially built or passenger aircraft or on a long submarine voyage. Most curious of all is that this document was written almost seven months before the alleged suicide of Hitler in the Bunker of the Chancery. Is it that the Americans were already alerted about Hitler's possible plans once the war ended and did not report it to their Allies? Between 16 July and 31 October 1944, several American media echo the same news. On 16 July  1944, it is the "St. Petersburg Times", titled, 'Can Hitler Escape?': Senior government officials have predicted last night that as the terror that now grips Germany begins to lighten, Adolf Hitler will try to escape from his "Holy Nazi Land". But where, they ask themselves, can Hitler go? To which country could he go? In the complete text of the article different declarations of congressmen and senators are collected recommending what must be done with Hitler after the end of the war. On 18 September, the "United Press" from its London office cites Finnish officials who had visited Berlin and who had had contact with senior officers of the German General Staff: [...] Adolf Hitler has prepared a capable submarine to reach Japan, "if and when Germany collapses." [...] The submarine, equipped as a passenger ship, would be in Gdynia, on the Baltic coast.

On 28 September 1944, "The Free Lance Star" newspaper titled 'It is sought to prevent the evasion of Hitler'. The article highlights the clear warning of Secretary of State Cordell Hull to neutral nations stating that they will lose American friendship if they give sanctuary to Hitler or other leaders of the Axis after the war. The US warnings are directed mainly at Sweden, Turkey, Switzerland and Spain, "although all of them have given assurances that they will not allow Axis nationals to fly within their borders or that they are fully aware of the problems that such action might cause". Again, on 2 October 1944, the story of Hitler's possible evasion in a submarine stationed in Gdynia, north of the port of Gdansk, is again made public. The "Ellensburg Daily Record" publishes an article on 2 October 1944 entitled 'Can Hitler Escape?' Apparently, the rumor of the submarine in which the Fiihrer was alleged to have fled would have originated from a source in Sweden: The 1,200-tonne submarine could perhaps sail 20,000 miles without refueling. [...] Vast gold stores are being prepared to board. It is believed that it would stop in Argentina and other points in the route towards the final destination that, according to reports, there is no doubt that it would be Japan. The ship would have been built in the shipyards of Gydnia. [...] The commander would be the hero of the German submarines, Lieutenant Lüuth, the only sailor to have the Iron Cross Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Diamonds. The article refers to Wolfgang Lüth, one of the most decorated commander of the U-Boot fleet of the war. In March 1943, the U-181 under the commandl of Lüth left the port of Bordeaux in order to patrol in North Africa and in the Indian Ocean. In spite of difficulties the U-181, after 205 days of patrol, managed to sink to a dozen ships [45,331 tons in total] and its commander became the first member of the Kriegsmarine to receive the highest decoration of the German army. Mysteriously in early 1944, he was removed from active duty and sent as an instructor to the Navy school, or Marineschule, in Flensburg-Mürwik, the place where the future officers of the Kriegsmarine were prepared.

On 31 October 1944, the "St. Petersburg Times" newspaper echoes briefly Commander Werner Bender's remarks about the possibility that Hitler might escape on a submarine. Bender told a small audience at the Nazi Naval Academy in Denmark that "the German Navy will organize for Adolf Hitler his submarine flight when the final defeat arrives". If one day it were really necessary that our Führer leave Germany it would be with the German Navy that knows the world's oceans and has U-Boot bases and hiding places in the most remote seas. Apparently the statement of Bender was actually made in late 1943 and collected by the press a year later. Captain Werner Bender was to die on 4 October 1943 when his U-841 submarine was sunk off Cape Farewell, south of Greenland, after a deep-sea attack launched by the British frigate 'HMS Byard'. it would be terrible reality that the man who caused the death of millions of human beings could have escaped justice with his wife Eva Braun and spent his last days in  quiet Argentina with his deputy, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann and the head of The Gestapo Heinrich Müller, known as "Gestapo Müller". Based on documentary evidence that would demonstrate that both the US with its Paperclip Operation and Britain with Operation Epsilon facilitated the flight of war criminals to both countries, it would not be foolish to say that any Allied Intelligence service would have preferred to close its eyes and ears before the "known" escape of Hitler.

The acclaimed historian and former member of British Intelligence Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1947 wrote a book based on his report entitled "The Last Days of Hitler", insisting that Hitler committed suicide in the Bunker on 30 April 1945 and based on this story the Allied powers accepted the debate without asking questions and in this way spread it to the public. For the victorious Western powers in the war, what George Orwell wrote in his 1984 work, "Whoever controls the past controls the future" must be fulfilled. The historian -the same who certified with Eberhard Jäckel and Gerhard Weinberg, Hitler's famous false diaries as authentic in 1983- based his data on the last moments of the Führer's life on an interview with the Aviator Hanna Reitsch, Hitler's favorite pilot. In 1958, Reitsch herself declared that she did not know anything about Trevor-Roper, let alone talk to him about what happened inside the Bunker during the siege and fall of Berlin. Trevor-Roper also had no access to the Germans, civilians or soldiers, who remained in the Chancellery Bunker until the last moment. Some had committed suicide, others had disappeared among the millions of refugees moving aimlessly across Europe, others had been captured by the Soviets and transferred to the Soviet Union and others simply died a few days after the end of the war. Hugh Trevor-Roper was only able to access the transcripts of the interrogations carried out by US counter-Intelligence of officials of the Chancellery, members of the SS, and a circle close to the Führer who were

in the Bunker. The only witness to whom he had direct access was Erich Kempka, Hitler's driver, and he was not even inside the Bunker at the time of the alleged suicide of Hitler and Eva Braun. The British historian could not see any image of Hitler and Eva Braun dead simply because there was none, nor could he study the scene because when Trevor-Roper was able to enter the Bunker, it was completely flooded. Nor could he read any reports of the place of burial or cremation, nor any medical reports because they were not performed, much less autopsies. The wills, both personal and political, appeared in the month of December 1945, a month after Trevor-Roper made public the results of his investigation. Cremation site studies were conducted by the Soviets and, of course, did not give Trevor-Roper access to them.
 

Hitler’s Teeth Reveal Nazi Dictator’s Cause of Death
Natasha Frost
18 May 2018

In a new study, French scientists analyzed fragments of Adolf Hitler’s teeth to prove that he died in 1945, after taking cyanide and shooting himself in the head. The research, published in the "European Journal of Internal Medicine" in May 2018, seeks to end conspiracy theories about Adolf Hitler’s death through scientific analysis of the dictator’s teeth and skull.

“Our study proves that Hitler died in 1945,” lead study author Philippe Charlier told AFP. “The teeth are authentic, there is no possible doubt.”

Though it’s widely established that Hitler died in his bunker in Berlin, rumors of his escape abound. Their research proves that “he did not flee to Argentina in a submarine, he is not in a hidden base in Antarctica or on the dark side of the moon,” said Charlier.

In late April 1945, as Soviet forces stormed Berlin, Hitler made plans for his suicide, including testing SS-supplied cyanide pills on his Alsatian, Blondi, and dictating a final will and testament. Two days earlier, Mussolini had been shot by a firing squad and then publicly hung by his feet in a suburban square in Milan, Italy: A similar fate seemed inevitable.

Late on April 30, the bodies of Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, were found in the Bunker, with a bullet hole in Hitler’s temple.

In April 2018, the English publication of the memoirs of a Russian interpreter revealed how she had been entrusted with a set of teeth in 1945, and tasked with cross-checking them against the dictator’s dental records: They matched, and have remained in Russian hands ever since, the Telegraph reported.

After months of negotiations, Russia’s FSB secret service and the Russian state archives gave the researchers permission to examine a skull fragment and bits of his teeth. The piece of skull had a hole on its left side, consistent with a bullet wound, with black charring around the edges.

Though scientists weren’t allowed to take samples from the skull, they noted in the study, its shape seemed “totally comparable” to radiographies of Hitler’s skull taken a year before his death.

Gruesome pictures of the teeth published in the study show a jaw made mostly of metal. “At the moment of his death,” they wrote in the report, “Hitler had only four remaining teeth.” The few there are are misshapen, brown at the base, and flecked with white tartar deposits.

The analysis corroborated frequently-cited claims that Hitler was a vegetarian, but could not conclusively prove whether he took cyanide before the gunshot. Bluish deposits on his false teeth, the researchers wrote, suggest a variety of different hypotheses—did some chemical reaction take place between his fake teeth and the cyanide at the moment of death, during his cremation, or while the remains were buried?

Without taking samples for analysis, it’s hard to say for sure. “We didn’t know if he had used an ampule of cyanide to kill himself or whether it was a bullet in the head. It’s in all probability both,” Charlier said.

Either way, the study may help finally put to tales of Hitler’s flight to rest, once and for all.

They Saved Hitler’s Skull. Or Did They?
A new book reopens the decades-old controversy about how exactly Adolf Hitler died, and what happened to his body.
By Jean-Marie Pottier
30 April 2018

Seventy-three years ago, on Monday, Adolf Hitler killed himself in his Berlin Bunker alongside his wife of one day, Eva Braun. With the Red Army closing in, their bodies were hastily burned and buried in a shell crater in the nearby garden.

That’s the official story anyway.

Hitler was alone in his study with Braun when they died by suicide. Only a handful of Nazis saw the bodies before they were wrapped in gray blankets and moved to the Chancellery garden to be cremated.

Two of the witnesses, the new Chancellor Josef Göbbels and Hitler’s private secretary, Martin Bormann, killed themselves in the following days.

The small number of surviving people who actually saw the bodies or material evidence is one reason for the range of various conspiracy theories that have persisted over the years: that Hitler did not die in Berlin but fled to the South Pole or Japan, that he died in 1962 in Argentina, in 1971 in Paraguay or in 1984 in Brazil.

In an effort to definitely put these theories to rest, two investigative journalists, the  French Jean-Christophe Brisard and the Russian-American Lana Parshina recently carried out an investigation whose results were published in France last month as a book ["La mort d’Hitler] and television documentary ["Le mystère de la mort d’Hitler]. An English translation is scheduled to come out in September.

Brisard and Parshina, who is also the director of a documentary about the reclusive daughter of Josef Stalin, Svetlana About Svetlana, based their research on the examination of still-classified documents about the last days in the Bunker and the discovery and the authentication of the bodies of Hitler and Braun, preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, in the vaults of the FSB [the Russian Intelligence service, heir to the KGB], and at the Russian State Military Archive.

As the centerpiece of their investigation, they analyzed, with the help of Philippe Charlier, a French scientist who specializes in historical “cold cases,” two bone fragments in the Russian government’s possession long believed to belong to Hitler: a skull fragment with a bullet hole preserved in a floppy-disk storage box in the State Archive, uncovered in 1993 and displayed to the public as part of an exhibition in 2000, and a jawbone stored in a cigarillo box in the FSB archives. Their findings are confident, if unspectacular: They cannot prove with only a visual analysis that the fragment of skull is or is not Hitler’s [“It belongs to an adult. Period,” says Charlier] but are sure that the jawbone is.

Charlier’s previous studies, involving alleged remains of French king Henry IV and the revolutionary leader Robespierre, have been subject to controversy. In the case of Hitler’s skull, his findings support those from the early 1970s by an American scholar, Reidar F. Sognnaes, with a Norwegian colleague, Ferdinand Ström. Sognnaes and Ström did not have access to the actual jawbone and relied on testimonies of Hitler’s dentist and physicians, X-Ray plates taken after a 1944 assassination attempt, and findings of the Russian autopsy to assert that “Hitler did in fact die, and that the Russians did indeed recover and autopsy the right body.”

Charlier analyzed the teeth with a stereo microscope and was even able to dissect a few particles he involuntarily brought back with him in France, stuck to his laboratory gloves, and concluded that the jawbone presented to him is not a “historical forgery.” He asserts: “We are certain of the anatomical correspondence between the radiographies, the descriptions of the autopsies, the tales of the witnesses, especially those who made these dental prostheses, and what we had in hands.” Brisard and Parshina add, with similar confidence: “We can state that Hitler died in Berlin on April the 30th, 1945. Not in Brazil at 95, nor in Japan, nor in the Argentinian Andes. The proof is scientific, not ideological. Coldly scientific”.

To obtain access to the archives, the two authors write that they had to endure “months and months of unending negotiations, repeated demands expressed by email, by mail, by phone, by fax [yes, often still in use in Russia], in person with stubborn civil servants.” The description of their investigations makes for a lively tale, full of appointments not honored, rude secretaries, and unexpected twists, like the purchase of a bottle of Armenian cognac to mollify an archivist or a visit to a storage room where all oxygen is expulsed at night to trap any illegal visitors. But the most interesting lesson is elsewhere: Their book describes how the death of Hitler, for more than seven decades and counting, became a cold case with ideological implications during the Cold War.

As the British historian Antony Beevor wrote in 2002 in his book Berlin: "The Downfall 1945", “the whole question of Hitler’s fate had begun to assume immense political significance before the facts were clear”. The first political strife was internal to the Soviet Union state, as the question of Hitler’s death became caught up in a power struggle between Stalin’s military and interior ministries.

The fate of the bodies was symbolic of this strife. On May 5, a unit of the SMERSH, the counte-Iintelligence organization of the Red Army, dug up the cremated remains, including the jawbone preserved today in the archives, and kept them from the 5th Shock Army, supposedly in control of the bunker zone. Written at the end of May by Aleksandr Vadis, a unit leader of the SMERSH, the first report on the death of Hitler was based on the testimonies of Harry Mengershausen, a member of Hitler’s personal guard, and Käthe Heusermann, the assistant of the dictator’s dentist, who identified the jaw presented to her as Hitler’s. The report assumed that the deaths were caused by cyanide ingestion.

The jawbone, the decisive proof, was brought to Moscow. The rest of the remains were reburied at the beginning of June 1945 in secret by the SMERSH 50 miles west of Berlin at Rathenow. They would be dug up again a few months later, at the beginning of 1946. Anxious to keep them at hand, the SMERSH exhumed the corpses of Hitler, Eva Braun, Josef Göbbels, his wife, their six children, and Hans Krebs, the chief of staff of the German army, and buried them again in Magdeburg, near its headquarters in the Russian occupation zone of East Germany. In 1970, when the Magdeburg base was returned to East German control, then KGB director and future general secretary of the communist party Yuri Andropov asked that the remains be destroyed.

Then there’s the story of the skull. A few days before the Nazi collapse, Otto Günsche, Hitler’s bodyguard, was captured by the NKVD, the Soviet interior ministry, and said that his former boss shot himself in the head. NKVD chief Lavrenti Beria hated his rivals in the Smersh and saw an opportunity to discredit them by casting doubt as to whether they had autopsied the right bodies. At the beginning of 1946, the NKVD initiated the “Operation Myth,” which involved harsh interrogations, often carried in the middle of the night, of all the occupants of the bunker they could find, including Günsche and also Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, and Haus Baur, his personal pilot. Their testimonies converged, with several discrepancies, on the theory of a death by gunshot. The operation also led to new excavations near the Führerbunker and the discovery in May 1946, 20 inches deep, of a skull fragment with a bullet hole. The death by shooting theory revolves around the skull.

Cold War paranoia played a major part in the ambiguity around Hitler’s death. Stalin himself never seriously doubted the suicide of his archenemy “Now he’s had it. Pity we couldn’t take him alive. Where’s the corpse?” he reportedly asked when informed of Hitler’s death by Gen. Georgy Zhukov], but the Soviets tried to keep their allies in the dark on that matter. On 2 May 1945, the state news agency "Tass" said that the announcement on German radio of the reports of Hitler’s death were a “fascist trick to cover [his] disappearance from the scene". On 26 May, Stalin told U.S. Ambassador W. Averell Harriman and President Harry Truman’s envoy, Harry Hopkins, that he thought Hitler did not die but fled with his private secretary, Martin Bormann; Göbbels; and Krebs, and asserted the same opinion 10 days later, even pressuring Zhukov to say to the international press that Hitler “could have left Berlin by air at the last moment.” By keeping the Allies ignorant and spreading the rumor that Hitler might have fled to the Western Hemisphere, the Soviets hoped to force them to launch a costly and useless intelligence operation.

After the end of the war, the Soviet Union held the witnesses of Hitler’s last hours in secret captivity, only transferring them to Germany 10 years later, “at a time when the Western intelligence services had obtained on their own confirmation of the death of the dictator. But even then, Moscow was still arguing that Hitler did not shoot himself but took one of the cyanide capsules Heinrich Himmler gave him, which he had tested on his dog Blondi—the death of a coward, conforming to the wishes of the Soviet Propaganda. This theory was put forward in a book published in English in 1968 by a former Red Army interpreter, Lev Bezymenski. One of the most respected Hitler scholars, Ian Kershaw, described Bezymenski’s efforts in 2001 as an example of “the intentionally misleading account of Hitler’s death by cyanide poisoning put about by Soviet historians … [that] can be dismissed". The cyanide story was also challenged in 1993 when the Russian newspaper "Izvestia" revealed the existence of the skull fragment with the bullet hole, conserved in a cardboard box with the inscription “blue ink, for fountain pens.” The information was quickly confirmed by the Russian State Archive, which, shortly after the Soviet collapse, was eager to show more openness than its predecessors.

The Cold War was then over, but a cold case continues: The “Great Patriotic War” remains a central theme of Russian nationalism in the Putin era, and the government is still sensitive to allegations that Hitler escaped their grasp.

Russian history, and the way Western countries see it, is a sensitive topic. Brisard and Parshina’s investigations took place between the beginning of 2016 and the end of 2017, at a time when relations between Russia and the West were rapidly deteriorating over the crises in Syria and Ukraine as well as new allegations of election meddling.

When the authors requested permission to examine the remains of Hitler, the head of the State Archive answered: “By the way, who would do the analysis? Find someone scientifically irreproachable and not an American. Especially not an American”.

There was reason for their suspicion. In 2009, Nicholas F. Bellantoni, an archeologist at the University of Connecticut, claimed he had analyzed a sample of the skull in a documentary broadcast on the History Channel, bluntly titled Hitler’s Escape, and concluded that it belonged to a 40-year-old-woman—but probably not Eva Braun, who poisoned herself. His findings gave another impulse to the Hitler-did-not-die-in-the-Bunker cottage industry, exemplified by Jerome R. Corsi, the far-right American writer who, in addition to peddling theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace, is the author of "Hunting Hitler: New Scientific Evidence That Hitler Escaped Nazi Germany". Corsi claimed that Bellantoni’s work convinced him that “politically correct authorities” preferred to “invent a lie, canonizing the Hitler suicide story as the official version to avoid explaining their malfeasance to their citizens back home who were demanding justice for horrendous crimes Hitler had committed against humanity”. All of that despite the fact that Bellantoni, whose conclusions about the skull are hence far too assertive according to the French investigation, himself said in 2012 that he thought Hitler “didn’t escape; he clearly died in the Bunker. … Because the skull plate was not him doesn’t mean that he didn’t die in the Bunker, it simply means what they recovered was not him.”

The Russian State Archive had then claimed, and still claims, that Bellantoni never got access to its vaults. Both he and that History Channel say he did.

Russia’s wariness about letting the French team examine the skull may have been caused by fear they would come to the same conclusion as Bellantoni.

"To ask if the skull preserved in the State Archive is or is not Hitler’s", write the authors, “means talking politics, discussing the official position of the Kremlin. An unthinkable option for the head of the Archive. Absolutely unthinkable". 

When they question the FSB, a civil servant asks Lana Parshina, who obtained a green card in 1997 and has since become an American citizen: “Which side are you on? Are you Russian or American? You are like all these American journalists who refuse to believe we were the first to find Hitler. You are looking for a scoop". But at another moment, in the State Military Archive, a staff member blatantly leaves the room for a few minutes to let the authors read files they are not supposed to, and another, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, informed that they have brought home particles of Hitler’s jawbone, writes to them, in French, that they won’t be “prosecuted” if their findings “do not clash with the official position of Russia.”

That’s why the authors have the honesty, at one moment, to assess the possibility that they might be manipulated: “Why the FSB would hand us secrets so well kept since more than seventy years? Why us? … And if letting us consult the archives about the death of Hitler served the Russian propaganda?” At the last page of the book, Jean-Christophe Brisard asks Lana Parshina what would have happened if they had concluded Hitler’s teeth were not Hitler’s. She answers, calmly: “That would have been a huge problem for Russia”.

Adolf Hitler really is dead: scientific study debunks conspiracy theories that he escaped to South America
Führer’s appalling oral hygiene allows jawbone held in Moscow to be identified by its false teeth. French study also challenges US claims that skull fragment was from a woman
Adam Lusher
Independent 
20 May 2018 

A peer-reviewed study in an academic journal has proved what you might have assumed you already knew: Adolf Hitler is dead and has been since he killed himself in his Bunker in April 1945.

That scientists are devoting serious attention to proving this more than 70 years after the event may initially seem bizarre.

But almost from the moment the Führer died, a cottage industry of conspiracy theories sprang up to say he was still alive.

Now, though, French scientists have been allowed to examine a jawbone that has been jealously guarded in the archives of the Russian secret service since the 1940s.

The analysis published in the peer-reviewed European Journal of Internal Medicine suggests that in this instance the Russians were telling the truth: Hitler killed himself, SS soldiers burnt his body, Soviet troops found the charred remains, and the jawbone ended up in Moscow.

The snappily entitled study – 'The remains of Adolf Hitler: A biomedical analysis and definitive identification[ – recounts how the French researchers were allowed access to the jawbone in the archives of Russia’s FSB – the successor to the KGB – in March and July 2017.

The lead author of the research, Professor Philippe Charlier, told a French documentary that it had been possible to compare the jawbone held by the Russians to Hitler’s dental records, thus allowing the Führer to be identified by his false teeth.

Prof Charlier said that despite being only 56 when he died, Hitler had just five of his own teeth left.  

“We first identified him by his dentures, which were extremely unusual, in completely extraordinary shapes,” Prof Charlier told the documentary team.  “There was a perfect anatomical and technological correspondence.”

The conclusion was further corroborated by electron microscope analysis of tiny samples from Hitler’s few remaining real teeth, which found no traces of meat – significant because despite his murderous intent towards humans, Hitler was a vegetarian.

The state of the dentures also seemed to tally with the traditionally accepted account that Hitler took cyanide before a bullet was fired into his skull.

The research team suggested that bluish deposits on the dentures might indicate a chemical reaction between the cyanide and the metal dentures.

The French researchers also went some way to contradicting a University of Connecticut study, which in 2009 caused a sensation by claiming that a skull fragment with a bullet hole – stored in a different location to the jawbone – was from a woman, not Hitler, and not Eva Braun, because she poisoned rather than shot herself.  

The American academics had been able to examine and take DNA samples from the skull fragment that ended up in the Russian State Archive in Moscow.

They did not, however, examine the jawbone in the possession of the FSB. 

For the French researchers the situation was almost reversed: they were allowed to take material from the jawbone, but were only able to look at the skull fragment without taking DNA samples from it.

This meant they were not able to fully replicate the American testing which found female DNA, but Prof Charlier insisted that anthropological examination of the skull fragment could not establish the dead person’s gender. 

“From the anthropological perspective, that absolutely doesn’t hold,” he said. “When doing a diagnostic of the skull, you have a 55 per cent chance of getting the sex right. That’s not much better than chance.”.

The University of Connecticut findings were used by a TV production team as the basis for a documentary that was broadcast on the History Channel with the sensational title Hitler’s Escape.

Suggesting such a conclusion from the skull fragment alone may have been risky, however.

The new French study seems to suggest that whatever the provenance of the skull fragment, the jawbone is from the Führer and therefore there was no miraculous escape for Hitler.

Moreover, the jawbone’s authenticity seems to be further corroborated by the publication last month of the English translation of the memoir of wartime Russian interpreter Elena Rzhevskaya.

Ms Rzhevskaya, who died last year but who published her account in Russian in 1965, told how in May 1945 she was part of a Smersh counterintelligence unit scouring the ruins of Berlin for Hitler’s body.

She described her commanding officer handing her a cheap jewellery box and telling her, when she asked what was inside: “Hitler’s teeth. And if you lose them, you’ll be answerable with your head.”

As she opened the box and stared in amazement at the partially flesh-covered remains, the colonel explained that he had no access to a safe, so he was entrusting the Führer’s teeth to her because “as a woman, you’re less likely than a man to get drunk and lose them”.

With two superior officers, she went looking for Hitler’s dentist, only to find he had fled to Bavaria. But they found the dentist’s assistant, Kathe Heusermann, and – once they had reassured her they had not come to rape her – she took them to the dentist’s surgery inside the ruins of the Reich Chancellery.

There, Ms Rzhevskaya recounted, they found Hitler’s dental records and teeth X-Rays.

The following day, just to be sure, interrogators asked Frau Heusermann to describe Hitler’s teeth from memory.

Ms Rzhevskaya, who was translating, recalled that what the dentist’s assistant said matched what was on the X-rays. And then, when Ms Rzhevskaya opened the jewellery box, Frau Heusermann blurted out: “These are the teeth of Adolf Hitler.”

The blame for allowing this relatively straightforward identification of Hitler’s dead body to be obscured by tales of his continuing survival lies partly with his fellow dictator Joseph Stalin.

The historian Antony Beevor, author of "Berlin: The Downfall", has written about how Stalin had been keen to reassure himself that Hitler was dead, but equally keen to hide this news from his supposed allies Britain and America.

Instead, the communist newspaper "Pravda" [Truth] said rumours that Hitler’s body had been found were a fascist provocation.

The Soviet authorities spread the “alternative fact” that Hitler was alive and well and being looked after by the treacherous Americans in their zone of occupation.

According to Beevor, writing in the "New York Times" in 2009, Stalin even went as far as misleading his commander-in-chief Marshal Georgi Zhukov by berating him over the supposed failure to find Hitler’s body.

This may help explain why, when a group of high-ranking RAF officers tried to visit Hitler’s Bunker in 1946, they found it locked and guarded by an NCO from the NKVD secret police, who told the British delegation that Hitler had escaped and was now in hiding in Argentina.

The conspiracy theories had started, and over time they would multiply.  

By 1955 the head of the American’s CIA base in Maracaibo, Venezuela, was writing a memo about a claim that Hitler was living in the Colombian Andes at the head of a community of fugitive German fascists who followed him “with stormtrooper adulation”.

But what actually happened to Hitler’s body seems to have been more mundane, though perhaps more comical.

After he and Eva Braun killed themselves on 30 April 1945, military aides carried their bodies out of the bunker into the garden behind the Reich Chancellery, where they wrapped the Fuhrer’s body in a Nazi flag, doused it in petrol and set it alight.

They failed to completely burn the body, however, and ended up burying the charred remains in a shallow shell crater.

On the morning of 2 May, Soviet private Ivan Churakov spotted the freshly turned soil and started digging in the hope of finding hastily buried Nazi gold. Instead he found a leg bone.

Once Ms Rzhevskaya and her team had established who the remains belonged to, the all-important jawbone was sent to Moscow.

The Soviets buried the rest of the Führer on the outskirts of Berlin, moving the remains the following month to a forest near Rathenow.

Then in February 1946 they again disinterred the Führer and buried him in the grounds of the Russian army base in Magdeburg, in eastern Germany.

Meanwhile, in the same year, the ever-paranoid Stalin demanded extra reassurance that Hitler really was dead. So a second secret Soviet mission went to the shallow grave in the shellhole.

This mission recovered the skull fragment with the bullet hole, taking it back to Moscow where it ended up in the Russian State Archive.

Back in Germany the buried bits of Hitler lay undisturbed until March 1970.

But then the Russians decided to hand over the Magdeburg base to the East German government, presenting themselves with the problem of what to do with the body they had hidden beneath it.

The higher echelons of the Soviet leadership worried that if they didn’t take the body with them when they left the base, it might become a place of pilgrimage for neo-nazis.

Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB who would later become president, advised Russian leader Leonid Brezhnev that it would be “advisable to destroy the remains by incineration”.

This, it seems, was achieved by a trio of Russian soldiers being ordered to go on a bizarre “fishing trip”.

In 2001 Vladimir Gumenyuk, a then 64-year-old former Red Army soldier, told Russian media how on the night of 4 April 1970 he and two fellow soldiers were told to go and dig at a certain location.

Gumenyuk said they found some crates at a depth of 1.7m (5ft), loaded them onto a Jeep and at dawn drove off into the countryside, posing as off-duty soldiers with a set of fishing rods positioned to be immediately visible to any passer-by.  

Then, beside a river, hidden by a screen of trees, the Russians allegedly poured petrol over the crates and burned Hitler’s body more thoroughly than his Nazi soldiers had been able to do in 1945.

Gumenyuk claimed he collected the ashes and scattered them from the top of a nearby hill.

“I opened up the Rucksack, the wind caught the ashes up in a little brown cloud, and in a second they were gone,” he claimed.

He also swore to take the secret of where he had scattered the ashes to his grave.

Meanwhile, in 2000, the Russian State Archive displayed the skull fragment in an exhibition entitled The Agony of the Third Reich.

“It’s not just some bone we found in the street,” insisted archive boss Sergei Mironenko.

But if the intention had been to stop the conspiracy theories, the only result seems to have been renewed interest in the skull fragment, leading to the American claims nine years later.

Whether the French study has more luck in rebutting the conspiracy theories remains to be seen.

Given how the conspiracy theories about Hitler have survived for so long – even if the man himself hasn’t – it is anything but a foregone conclusion.
 

Did Hitler Survive World War Two?
Does evidence really suggest that the Führer fled Germany to enjoy a long, peaceful retirement in South America?

 Did Adolf Hitler die in the Bunker in Berlin?

The official line on Adolf Hitler is that he committed suicide on 30 April 1945, but some historians believe the brutal dictator lived for many years after that. 

Argument 1: Hitler Escaped Berlin

Picture the scene: Berlin, 1945. The city has been shattered by Allied bombings. Soviet soldiers are fighting in the streets, getting ever closer to Adolf Hitler's underground Bunker where he and his new bride Eva Braun, along with the Führer's last remaining friends and advisors, slowly face up to the truth of their defeat.

According to the generally accepted version of events, Hitler and Eva Braun decided to commit suicide rather than be taken into enemy hands. But according to controversial historian Gerrard Williams, author of "Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler", that's not exactly what happened.

"There's no forensic evidence whatsoever to suggest that Hitler or Eva Braun died in the Bunker," Williams says. "There is a huge amount of contemporary news reporting to say that he escaped and made it to Argentina where he lived until 1962."

According to Williams and other historians, Hitler and his wife made their escape through a network of bunkers beneath battle-torn Berlin. They resurfaced at a boulevard which had been turned into a makeshift runway. Here, a Luftwaffe pilot called Peter Baumgart frantically flew the Führer and Eva Braun to Denmark. They later flew on to Spain where they were allegedly aided by dictator General Franco, and eventually took a gruelling submarine trip across the Atlantic to Argentina.

Peter Baumgart would later testify in court that he did indeed fly Hitler to safety in 1945. Numerous eyewitness reports also claim that Hitler was spotted in Argentina for years after that, in locations ranging from restaurants to hotels to hospitals. Many parts of Argentina were thoroughly "Germanified", complete with Nazi ex-pats and buildings modelled after Bavarian cottages, so Hitler would have fitted in rather well, just like infamous Nazis Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichmann. There is even the possibility that the Nazis cut a deal with the Allies, bribing them with German military secrets in order to be left alone.

Here's another thing to bear in mind. Skull fragments recovered by the Soviets in Berlin, once thought to belong to Hitler, were later discovered to have come from a woman. Stalin himself believed Hitler had evaded capture, and recently declassified FBI reports reveal that J. Edgar Hoover had pondered the real whereabouts of the Führer.

In the words of war hero General Eisenhower, who would go on to become US President, "There is every assumption that Hitler is dead, but not a bit of conclusive proof that he is dead."

Argument  2: Hitler Died in the Bunker

Or perhaps all of that is absolute nonsense. Perhaps the official account is correct, and Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun did indeed end their own lives in the bunker. After all, they had every reason to do so. Would Hitler, a man of limitless narcissism and vanity, who had staked his future on the dream of a German empire, really have wanted to flee and live in pathetic obscurity halfway across the world?

Surely not. Eyewitnesses in the Bunker have testified that he was terrified of being captured alive and humiliated by the Soviets. He certainly wanted to avoid the fate of his fellow fascist Mussolini, who had been strung up and shot in public. Ailing, trembling, weak and disgusted by what he regarded as the betrayals of his own minions, Hitler would surely have preferred to end it all in the comfort of the bunker, rather than make a desperate, far-fetched dash for freedom across a war-torn Europe.

But what about the story of Peter Baumgart, who claimed to have flown the Nazi leader out of Berlin? Writer and historian Guy Walters, author of "Hunting Evil", dismisses him entirely. "Baumgart needed psychiatric evaluation, clearly the man was a fantasist," he says. "The Baumgart thing is by no means compelling and can by no means be considered evidence."

As for the lack of bodies at the site, the most straightforward explanation is that Hitler and Eva Braun's corpses were doused with petrol and burnt for several hours. While the skull fragment may not have been Hitler's, segments of jaw bones were found, and matched Hitler's dental records.

"So either someone was burnt with crowns and bridges in his mouth that were identical to Hitler's," Guy Walters says, "or it was Hitler. I don't know which one you want to believe".

What about the apparent stories of Hitler being spotted in Argentina? Many historians dismiss these as false claims by fraudsters eager to cash in on the Hitler phenomenon, to be taken no more seriously than stories of a still-living Elvis Presley. In fact, it's commonly thought that Stalin and Soviet agents deliberately spread rumours of Hitler surviving to make the Allies look bad - a disinformation battle that was part and parcel of the early Cold War.