Hitler's Final Days in the Bunker

Source: CIA Article

An exhibit titled "The Agony of the Third Reich: Retribution," which opened April 2000 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.

An article in the 28 May 1945 edition of "Time" magazine reported:

"A team of Soviet detectives concluded last week that if Adolf Hitler was dead, he had not died in the ruins of his Reich Chancellery.

"Led by quiet, blue-eyed, middle-aged Major Ivan Nikitine, Deputy chief of Stalin's own security police, Russian criminologists reconstructed the last days of Hitler in Berlin.

"Beside a bookcase in Hitler's personal room in the battle-wrecked Chancellery the sleuths found a thin concrete removable panel.

Behind it there was a man size tunnel which led to a super secret cement refuge 500 meters 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".

The knowledge of this secret passage tells us nothing.

We do not know who used to save their skins. Only free access to Russian archives which remain secret, will allow us to know the details about that hidden "emergency exit" which enabled escape from the underground refuge.

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 Alexander Suvorov.

As the tide of war turned, the Allies prepared for the possibility that high-ranking Nazis, including Hitler himself, might try to escape the country.

In 1944 for example, the US Office of Strategic Services [OSS] wartime Intelligence agency created a set of retouched photographs of Hitler in order to show how he could disguise himself to escape capture after Germany's defeat.

It never came to that. |

On 1  May 1945, Hitler’s appointed successor, Admiral Dönitz, announced on the radio that the German dictator had died.

President Truman relayed it to the American people the next day.

The catchphrase, however, was “to the best possible information,” and much doubt remained.

In a June 1945 poll, for example, 68% of Americans did not believe Hitler was dead

What Happened:

The first information about Hitler’s death came from the Russians, who were the first to enter Berlin during the final months of World War II and performed the first autopsy of the dictator’s charred body.

Although Stalin had demanded, and received, confirmation of Hitler’s death, he started a campaign of state-sponsored disinformation, arguing that Hitler was shielded by the former Western Allies.

In the chaotic months and years that followed, a disguised Hitler was supposedly spotted across Europe.

On 11 June 1945, for example, Spain’s foreign minister Felix Lequerica had to publically deny a Russian report indicating Hitler had found shelter in Spain.

Eager to prevent the creation of a “myth”  benefiting  the Soviets and distracting from the postwar reconstruction, British counter-Intelligence agent Hugh Trevor-Roper was apponted in November 1945 to investigate the death of Hitler.

An historian, Trevor-Roper used investigations and interviews with British, American, and Canadian Intelligence officers, and several German officials who had been present in the Führerbunker with Hitler.

The Soviets refused to help.

trevor-Roper drafted his report confirming the death of the German dictator within a year and turned his investigation into a book, "The Last Days of Hitler", published in March 1947 in England and in the United States in August 1947.

Despite efforts by conspiracy theorists, Hitler’s death is a fact accepted by every serious historian.

 For Stalin, who feared and usually eliminated potential rivals, it was time to cut him down to size.

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 Alexander 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.

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.

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Hitler’s Jaws of Death
By Antony Beevor
The Opinion Pages
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 Georgy 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.

There are actually only a couple of points of agreement between the entire accounts of Günsche, Linge and Kempka.

It is just another attempt to exploit the nightmare conspiracy theory that the source of unparalleled evil lived on somewhere, in secret?

---

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 anyone's 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 does not cut it.....

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 Vasily 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.

---

This article is very curious. The KGB claims do not 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 book, V. K. Vinogradov et al. [eds] Chaucer Press, London, 2005], quotes State Security General Ivan 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 does not prove that the corpse was not 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 is 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 to 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 Eva was in Berlin. What is 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 one accepts that Heusemann had lied about having worked on Hitler's teeth, one also has 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 could not 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, 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.....
 

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".

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

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 Reidar 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.

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
 

"Hitler Lives"
Does Stalin Really Believe That?
Examiner [Launceston, Tas]
8 July 1950

Why did the Russians change their minds about Hitler's death?

In May and early June 1945, the Russians in Berlin publicly admitted that Hitler was dead. On 6 June, Marshal Georgy Zhukov even stated there was no doubt about it. Three days later Zhukov recanted, saying he could give "no definite statement" and that it was all very mysterious. Why did he make this sudden volte-face?

That is one of the few questions which Mr. Trevor-Roper does not try to answer in the long and amusing introduction wrhich he has written for the second edition of his book, "The Last Days of Hitler". But at least. there is a strong presumption, as Trevor-Roper points out, that Stalin had something to do with Zhukov's change of mind. As early as 26 May Stalin told the ailing Harry Hopkins that he thought Hitler was hiding somewhere. He reiterated his opinion to Secretary of State James Byrnes at Potsdam in July.

It was no doubt partly the Russian attempts to cast doubt on Hitler's death that led the War Office to commission Mr. Trevor-Roper, then an Intelligence officer, to find out the true facts. After painstaking research and cross-examination of all available survivors from the Bunker, he was able to establish beyond any possibility of doubt that Hitler committed suicide, that his body was then burnt and that the final disposal of the ashes and other remains cannot be ascertained. Yet the Russians still remain silent, presumably in agreement with Stalin's known opinions.

But why should Stalin wish to believe or wish it to be believed that Hitler lives? One view is that he hopes to preserve the Bogeyman who so long assisted him to main tain his grip on the Russian people. Another suggestion is that a revival of Hitler at a suitable moment might help the Russians to consolidate their hold on Germany. Surely the first explanation which Stalin gave to Hopkins contained the truth, "the whole matter struck him as being very dubious". Stalin simply could not believe that Hitler could die amid scenes which read as if they were written for a cheap novelette. The last scenes in the Bunker which Trevor-Roper describes so vividly - the marriage with Eva Braun, the excommunication of Himmler, the orders for the arrest and execution of Göring, the Last Testament, the silent leave-taking, and finally the joint suicide followed by the burning of the bodies, would be incredible if the facts were not so well substantiated by a number of independent witnesses, who could only be located and questioned soma months after Hitler's death. So the truth may be that once Stalin had stated his views, no one in Soviet Russia dared tell him what every reader of Trevor-Roper's book knows - that beyond any possible doubt Hitler is dead.

While Mr. Trevor-Roper's main' conclusions hold, he has erred grievously in one respect. His speculations on how the Ruissians learnt of Eva Braun's marriage are quite wrong. On 9 June Marshal Zhukov announced at a press conference that on the evidence of diaries kept by Hitler's Adjutant, Hitler had married Eva Braun before he died. Basing his view on a statement by an aide to General Krebs, the German Army Chief of Staff, that none of the adjutants kept diaries, Trevor-Roper guesses that the diaries never existed and that the Russians invented them to conceal, for some unknown reason, the fact that after Hitler's death General Krebs went to Zhukov with a truce offer. But, in the first place, how could one man know for certain that no diary was being kept of the momentous events in the Bunker?

LONDON: From a bomb-ruined cellar under the Berlin Chancellery has come a scorched, blackened book which gives the first detailed authentic account of Hitler's life in the dying days of the Nazi Reich. It is Hitler's engagement book for the period January to June, 1944. It was kept by his personal adjutant, Sturmbannführer Heinz Linge. In it is related every movement, appointment, and conference of Hitler during six vital months.

Linge's duty was to organise the Führer's day. He accompanied him everywhere, recording everything methodically in the engagement book.  

​-- News [Adelaide, SA] 8 October 1945

And, secondly, it is not true that the Russians suppressed the evidence of the Krebs peace offer. If Trevor-Roper had consulted the files of the "Evening Standard" he would have learned that at the same press conference when Zhukov told the world of Hitler's marriage, a Russian lieutenant-colonel, a correspondent of the Red Army newspaper, gave a description of the last days, in Berlin with full details of the Krebs peace mission.

Last Days Of Berlin
Alleged Offer By Göbbels
From Our Special Representative
The Advertiser [Adelaide, SA]
26 July 1945

LONDON, 24 July: Göbbels during the last days of Berlin, offered to assume the leadership of a reorganised German Government, and conclude an armistice with the Russians. This was revealed last night by Lt-Gen. Peter Kosenko. who was artillery chief in the 5th Russian Army.

Lt-Gen. Kosenko said that, when fighting was at its fiercest in Berlin, at midnight on 30 April, a small group of Nazi officers, under a flag of truce, arrived at Soviet headquarters in the Friedrichstrasse. A German senior officer said that the Commander-in-Chief of the German forces in Berlin, General   Weidling, had authorised him to seek an armistice between tbe Soviet Government and a German Government, under Göbbels's leadership. He made no mention of what had become of Hitler, but inferred that he was dead, or had been handed over to the Russians. The Soviet High Command answered "Unconditional surrender, or else". The Germans returned to their lines, and the battle raged until the night of 1 May, when the Chancellery was finally stormed.

Trevor-Roper concludes his introduction by regretting his inability to see eye to eye with the numerous correspondents who had assured him "from Brighton and Bournemoth, and the Madras Presidency, that my conclusions would have been more certain had I consulted the oracles of Yogi and the Great Pyramid, or correctly interpreted the inspired books of Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation".

Hitler is dead: Official
Personal Column Tibor Szamuely
The Spectator
4 October 1968

I knew Lev Bezymenski fairly well in Moscow about twenty years ago, so the publication here of his volume called "The Death of Adolf Hitler" brings back some memories. We both worked on the weekly Novoye Vremya. He was considerably senior to me, not only in years, but also in social and editorial position. His father, Alexander Bezymenski. was one of Stalin's favourite court poets, renowned for his ability to turn out a neat piece of doggerel acclaiming the execution of some batch of  "enemies of the people" before the wretched men had even been sentenced. Lev, though, was quite different from his odious father, being intelligent, well-read, pleasant, and openly cynical about what he was doing.

Thanks to his impeccable background and excellent German Lev Bezymenski had had a good war—as Rokossovski's interpreter at Stalingrad, where he had officiated at Paulus's surrender, and later with Zhukov during the battle of Berlin. Our colleagues all regarded hini as a young man of considerable promise. But alas, I see that he is still in the same post he occupied twenty years ago. The reason is fairly obvious: Bezymenski is a Jew, and nowadays Jews do not get very far in the USSR, not even able propagandists like Bezymenski.

However, the appearance in the West of "The Death of Adolf Hitler", with all its accompanying publicity ballyhoo, represents a great Soviet propaganda coup, which may well bolster Lev's career.

Certainly Michael Joseph, the publishers, pull out all the stops: "A sensational historical document" which "ends all speculations' about 'the mystery of Adolf Hitler's death".' Bezymenski himself speaks of Hitler's death as an "enigma" regarding which western historians "have.confused the issue rather than clarifying it". With all respect, this is utter, unmitigated rubbish. There never has been any mystery about Hitler's death—not, at any rate, since the appearance in 1947 of Professor Hugh Tievor-Roper's classic "Last Days of Hitler" [which Bezymenski, curiously, totally ignores]. Indeed, the only country in the world where Hitler's death was for years officially disbelieved and all published evidence dismissed as falsification was ... the Soviet Union itself. On .6 June 1945 Stalin personally declared to Harry Hopkins that "he was sure that Hitler was still alive".' The pretence was kept up as long as Stalin lived.

Since Stalin's death the fact of Hitler's suicide has been disclosed in Russia, but no details were given.

Knowing that his "sensational revelation" is twenty-three years late, and realising that an explanation is in order, Bezymenski prevaricates. For such a glib writer the apologia is singularly lame: the forensic report, he confides, was kept secret in case some impostor might try to pass himself off as a miraculously preserved Hitler—and could then be triumphantly exposed.

However fantastic this line of reasoning may seem to the western reader, a Russian might find it rather convincing. It would certainly fit into one of his nation's most cherished traditions, that of the royal impostor. Whenever some important personage died in mysterious circumstances [and this happened with great frequency] the country would soon be full of people passing themselves off as the wondrously resurrected "deceased".' The two false Dmitrys and the false Peter III [Pugachev] are only the most famous of these impostors. Even in the nineteenth century many [if not most] Russians were convinced that Alexander I had not really died, but had gone off to live in Siberia as the "holy man Fyodor Kuzmich".' And the Grand Duchess Anastasia is still with us.

Yet nevertheless Bezymenski's excuses must be rejected. In this case it is a question not of doubting some outside [and therefore hostile] story, but of deliberately suppressing the truth and systematically spreading a known falsehood. Had Stalin really wanted to deter a false Hitler the best way would have been to publish the full autopsy report. The truth is much simpler. By keeping alive the possibility of Hitler's continued existence the Soviet rulers were able to preserve for many years a state of constant war hysteria. I well remember how every fresh news about Hitler's putative emergence would cause a new wave of panic in the war-devastated land. Which was just what Stalin wanted.

Well then, one can say, at least Bezymenski has finally laid Hitler's ghost. Ah, but that is exactly what he has not done: the one country where the autopsy report still cannot be read remains Russia—to the best of my knowledge the book has not been published there. It is destined exclusively for consumption abroad— where nobody ever doubted Hitler's suicide to begin with.

Why, then, has it been published at all? And why the hullabaloo? It enriches the sum of human knowledge with one minute detail, and one only: the "fact" that Hitler committed suicide not by shooting but by poison. This may be true—and who cares, anyway?—but then again, it may be untrue. Personally, I find the proofs less than satisfactory.

Bezymenski prints the text of Hitler's autopsy report—but, oddly enough, "in somewhat abbreviated form", unlike the autopsies of Eva Braun and of Göbbels and his wife and children, all printed in full. Yet one extraordinary feature immediately strikes even the layman's eye: the report mentions in passing that "part of the cranium is missing",' and then announces that "no visible signs of severe lethal injuries or illnesses could be detected".' Now, I am not a medical man, and for all I know the absence of part of the skull may indicate no more than a nasty cold—yet I would have thought that the eminent experts might have paid some attention to this interesting lacuna, if only out of pure scientific curiosity. But no, they contentedly packed up their instruments and trooped off.

Besides, as Professor Trevor-Roper has pointed out, the poison version contradicts every single German eye-witness account. Bezymenski loftily replied to this objection in a recent newspaper interview: "I have a certain mistrust of anyone who surrounded Hitler at this time, whereas our documents were prepared by an autopsy commission of five doctors, all of whom have become internationally recog nised since. And they are bound by the Hippo-cratic Oath just as much as Western doctors, you know".'

Bezymenski always was a humorous and cynical fellow, but this is going a bit too far. Soviet doctors bound by the Hippocratic Oath? Really! What will he think of next! The history of the USSR presents a long procession of "internationally recognised" authorities lying their heads off about medical evidence.

Take Katyn. for example. It has now been conclusivelly established that 4.000 Polish prisoners of war were murdered in Katyn by the Soviet secret police in early' 1940; yet in 1943 famous Soviet medical experts, flying in the face of all the evidence, signed a report stating that the crime had actually been committed by the Germans in late 1941—which brings me back to Bezymenski. The ultimate authority whom he invokes to prove that Hitler could not have died in any other way except by poison is "the foremost Soviet forensic scientist" Professor Smol yaninov. Bezymenski omits to mention that Smolyaninov had been a member of the Katyn commission.

I am not implying that Soviet doctors are all cheats and perjurers. On the contrary, some of my best friends—indeed, both my parents-in- law—were Soviet doctors, upright, hardworking people. I am only saying that when it comes to raison [fetal Soviet doctors are apt to be influenced by factors infinitely stronger than the "Hippocratic Oath" - the threat of a bullet through the head, for example.

What does all this leave us with? Bezymenski's book could easily be condensed to four words: "Hitler is dead: Official". Not much of a thirty-bob's worth. For what purpose, then, was it written? One probable reason is the Soviet obsession with the revival of "'neo- Nazism" in West Germany. Bezymenski clearly wishes to forestall the rise of a Hitler-Legend by showing that the Führer was an arrant coward; he endlessly stresses the profound difference between a "soldier's death" by revolver shot and a "dog's death" by poison. The old- fashioned, highly romantic Russian mind still attaches great significance to such things.

However, I believe that Bezymenski's main object is somewhat different. It is to foster the legend of the omniscience and omnipotence of the Soviet secret police. The "glorious Chekists" are the heroes of the book They are everywhere; they know everything nothing can escape them; they leave no stone unturned; all the facts are in their files, but they maintain an inscrutable silence until the moment comes to talk—or to strike. Secure in their superior knowledge, KGB officers exchange "ironical smiles"' about the "entertaining picture" drawn by amateurish and incompetent western investigators. On most pages one finds laudatory references to the state security organs; the dread acronym SMERSH appears no fewer than thirty- four times. In places Bezymenski waxes quite lyrical about the Chekists who had "devoted their lives to combating the enemies of the Soviet State" [and also to murdering countless millions of their own countrymen\.

Bezymenski's opus appears to be part of the concerted propaganda campaign now being conducted in the West on behalf of the KGB. Among other components of this massive operation one might mention the "Lonsdale" and Philby books. As for the Führer, he has now suffered the final indignity his charred body is displayed as an advertisement to the skill and efficiency of the Soviet secret police.

"KGB exposes best. Reject all inferior brands".

The Woman Who Held Hitler's Teeth
In the days following the end of WWII, translator Elena Rzhevskaya was tasked with a bizarre job: protecting a jewelry box containing the only irrefutable proof of Hitler's death.

When we hear the name Hitler, we don't often think about his cavities. Given the towering history of World War II, it's odd to consider its architects as real human beings, with bad breath and stomach trouble, shoes that hurt, compressed spines, and artificial teeth. Hitler, for all that he was portrayed as an archetype of evil, was also a man of flesh and blood who eventually became a corpse. And when he died, proof of his death was carried through the ruins of Berlin by a young woman who found herself thrust into some of strangest, and most strangely human, moments of the end of the war.

During the spring of 1945, Elena Kagan was a 25-year-old war widow working as a German translator with the Soviet Red Army. Born to a well-off family of Moscow Jews, she had been a literature student and young mother when the war broke out. Her husband, an intellectual writer, was killed early in the conflict, and Kagan says she enlisted with the army as a way to feed her daughter. Her knowledge of German proved essential for interrogating prisoners, but her most memorable task began on 29 April 1945, when she was assigned to a team of three charged with finding Hitler, dead or alive. Her memoir of her war days, first published as "Berlin Notes" in a Soviet literary magazine in 1965, provided the world with the first details about how Hitler's body had been found and identified. A fuller version of her memoir went on to appear in more than ten languages, but has never been published in English, aside from selections in obscure journals and anthologies.

In her writings, Kagan--who later changed her name to Rzhevskaya in honor of the city of Rzhev, where she first experienced the full extent of the war--describes her compassion for the captured German soldiers, many barely adults, their bloodshot eyes wild with terror, and for the German women who were treated as war booty. She writes of orphans and cows wandering the bombed-out streets, soldiers getting drunk on the fine wines left by the fleeing Nazis, a Russian telegraphist trying on Eva Braun's long white evening dress, and, finally, what it was like to walk around carrying Hitler's teeth.

She was given the teeth on 8 May, eight days after Hitler's death, when they were placed in a red jewelry box for her safekeeping. "I don't know where they found the box," she writes in the latest version of her recollections, "Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter",

"It was old, dark claret in color, with a soft satin lining inside--the kind of box made for perfumes or for cheap jewelry... That entire day was infused with the sense of approaching victory, and it was a great burden to carry this box around the whole time, feeling a rush of cold inside at the thought that I might accidentally forget it somewhere. The box weighed heavy on me. It oppressed me".

The day Rzhevskaya refers to, 8 May 1945, was the day Germany signed an act of surrender, and much of the world erupted in celebration. It was also the day of Hitler's autopsy at a makeshift morgue in a clinic in Buch, on the northwest outskirts of Berlin. Rzhevskaya reports that she didn't come to close to the "roughly made crates with their awful black remains inside," but she describes the difficult search for Hitler's body, rife with confusion and false positives.

Hitler had committed suicide in his unker beneath the chancellery on 30 April 1945, and asked his aides to burn his body until nothing remained. He didn't want his body to be displayed in some Moscow waxworks, he declared, or in a "spectacle arranged by Jews". But the Soviets remained unaware of his fate until the next day, when General Hans Krebs exited the Bunker and, as part of a failed attempt to negotiate an armistice, informed a Soviet commander that Hitler was dead.

Several days later, a Soviet soldier found the half-charred bodies of a man and a woman buried inside a shell crater near the bunker's emergency exit. He'd noticed the tip of a gray blanket peeking out from the crater, which matched descriptions--produced by interrogating the few aides who remained in the Bunker--of the blanket in which Hitler and Eva Braun's corpses had been wrapped. The bodies were accompanied by two dogs, later identified as Hitler's beloved Blondi and one of her pups. Surrounding the dead were several dark-colored medicine phials, pages of handwriting, money, and a metal medallion that read, "Let me be with you foreve.".

Soldiers packed the remains into wooden ammunition crates, and Rzhevskaya and her team accompanied them to the morgue in Buch. Hitler's autopsy was directed by Colonel Faust Iosifovich Shkaravsky but performed by a woman, Major Anna Yakovlevna Marants. She noted that the corpse was badly carbonized, giving off the "odor of burned meat," and only the jaws remained relatively unscathed. The doctors pried the bones loose, and then Rzhevskaya was given the claret-colored box.

Teeth are like signatures--no two people have the same set. Unlike signatures, they're hard to forge. They've been used to identify bodies in criminal trials since the mid-19th century, and the Soviet doctors knew that Hitler's jaws would be key to proving his death to the world.

After the autopsies, around midnight, Rzhevskaya's team heard news of Germany's surrender on the radio. "Silently we poured wine," she writes. "I put the little box on the floor. Silently the three of us clinked glasses, filled with emotion, disheveled, lost for words, as the sounds of fireworks in Moscow came through the radio. I ran back down the steep staircase to the ground floor... I will never forget the feeling that rushed over me at that moment. Was this really happening to me? Was this really me standing there at the hour of Germany's surrender clutching a box containing the last remaining irrefutable proof about Hitler?"

When dawn broke the next morning, Rzhevskaya and her team set off to search for anyone with information about Hitler's mouth. Driving through what remained of Berlin's roads, dotted with collapsed buildings and thick with refugees, they found a still-functioning hospital, where they asked a doctor for the name of Hitler's dentist. The doctor had no clue, but he directed them to a famous laryngologist, Carl von Eicken, who had treated Hitler. A Bulgarian student working at Eicken's clinic knew the name of Hitler's dentist, Professor Blaschke, and climbed into Rzhevskaya's car to direct them to his dental office on one of Berlin's poshest streets. There, a doctor emerged wearing a red ribbon in his buttonhole, "a sign of welcome and solidarity with the Russians," Rzhevskaya writes. He explained that Hitler's dentist had fled, but that his dental assistant, Käthe Hausermann, lived just a few doors down.

Was this really me standing there clutching a box containing the last remaining irrefutable proof about Hitler?

Hausermann walked in wearing a blue coat; Rzhevskaya describes her as a tall, attractive woman in her mid-thirties, blond hair escaping a scarf tied around her head. Upon seeing the Russians, she began to weep. She had been raped by Soviet soldiers before and had to be convinced this group was friendly. Once calmed, she was asked to describe her memory of Hitler's teeth. The location of his crowns and a sawn-through upper left bridge matched the teeth in the jewelry box, but Rzhevskaya's team needed further proof. Hausermann led them to a tiny, mildewed dental office in Hitler's Bunker, where she produced Hitler's dental X-Rays. The images--the placement of root canal fillings, sites of bone breakdown, and unusual bridges--confirmed that the body found in the rubble outside the chancellery had belonged to Hitler. A dental technician named Fritz Echtmann, who had worked in the same laboratory as Hausermann and created crowns and bridges for both Hitler and Eva Braun, verified the findings.

Later, when Rzhevskaya asked Hausermann why she had remained in Berlin instead of fleeing alongside her boss, the dental assistant replied that she had lost contact with her fiancé and wanted to stay in Berlin so he would be able to find her. [She had also buried a cache of dresses outside the city, "saving them from the bombs and the flames," Rzhevskaya writes, and wanted to stay close to them].) After the war, Hausermann would be deported to the Soviet Union, to spend ten years in Russian labor camps. Her crime? Having helped sustain a bourgeois regime through dental work.

With the confirmation in place, Rzhevskaya wrote a letter to her family in Moscow telling them she would soon be coming home. That didn't happen--as far as Stalin was concerned, there was still work to do. The American press reported that Hitler's body had been found, but the Russian media encouraged the idea that Hitler was still in hiding. In fact, Stalin would eventually keep the truth about Hitler's death from even his top commanders. In fact, when Rzhevskaya later met the commander who had led the assault on Germany and captured Berlin, Georgy Zhukov, in the 1960s, he asked her: "Is Hitler really dead?"

While awaiting word from Stalin about what to do next, Rzhevskaya's team moved to the small town of Finow, where they had the remains in the wooden boxes secretly sent to them. Late one night, they buried the boxes in the forest. Stalin dispatched a general to confirm their findings, then sent word that although he was satisfied, he would not make the results public because the "capitalist encirclement remain[ed] in place". Rzhevskaya wasn't allowed to return to Moscow for months. Meanwhile, Hitler's remains were moved to a military base in Magdeburg in 1946, and in 1970, before the base was returned to German control, they were exhumed, burned again, ground into dust, and thrown into a tributary of the Elbe river. Hitler had finally achieved the task he commanded his aides to carry out after death--no trace of him remained on this earth. Well, except for those jaws.

The placement of root canal fillings, sites of bone breakdown, and unusual bridges confirmed that the body found in the rubble had belonged to Hitler.

Rzhevskaya says she has long pondered Stalin's decision not to announce the confirmation of Hitler's death. In "Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter", she notes that "the system that Stalin built could only survive as long as it had an enemy to face, both within and without... If Hitler was still alive then it meant that Nazism had not yet been completely defeated and the world would remain in a state of tension"--tension that Stalin hoped to manipulate to his own ends.

Stalin encouraged reports saying that Hitler had fled to Argentina, was being sheltered by Franco in Spain, or had been spotted hiding in various outposts around the world.

By Rzhevskaya's account, he needed his old enemy.

But Rzhevskaya was determined that the world should know the truth. Still alive at age 95 and residing in Moscow, where she's an accomplished writer with several memoirs and six war novels to her credit, she says she battled state censorship for years before publishing her accounts of the war's last days. "By the will of fate," she writes, "I came to take part in ensuring that Hitler was unable to achieve his final objective of disappearing, turning into a myth".

First published in 1968, “The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives,” by journalist Lev Bezymenski was the means by which the Soviet Union chose to inform the world of the findings of the Russian medical team that performed the autopsy on Hitler’s corpse in 1945. [The Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev decreed an invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crack down on resistance to Soviet occupation and dissension from Communism]. Why were the findings of Hitler’s autopsy kept secret for so many years? 

Notable among the Soviet autopsy findings was the claim that Adolf Hitler was missing a testicle. Lev Bezymenski had been described variously as a Soviet journalist, an historian, and an Iintelligence officer [a member of Red Army Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s staff].

Hitler’s Last Minute
Hugh Trevor-Roper 
The New York Review of Books  
September 26, 1968

"The Death of Adolf Hitler, Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives"
Harcourt, Brace & World, by Lev Bezymenskl

A few months ago, the German publisher Christian Wegner offered to his Western colleagues a share in a great scoop. From Russia he had obtained a book which, he said, would be "a sensation to all, not only the historians"; for it would, "for the very first time," show to the world the true story of Hitler’s death, as documented from Soviet archives. This new story, he said, would "considerably alter the picture which the world has had of Hitler’s death".”

In making his offer, Dr. Wegner gave nothing away. The author of the new book was not named. The text was not to be divulged till it had been paid for. A similar technique, it may be recalled, was adopted in respect of Svetlana Stalin’s memoirs, which might or might not encourage the purchaser. Finally, after sale, no advance review copies were sent out: the bomb was to explode all at once.

Now it has exploded.

The author is revealed as Mr. Lev Bezymenski, co-editor of the Soviet journal "Novoe Vremia". Mr. Bezymenski was evidently an interpreter during the war and was present at the battle for Berlin. He has since written, we are told, "numerous articles on current events which were published throughout the Eastern countries". This makes it all the more remarkable that his present book is apparently for Western consumption only. No publication in communist countries [I am told] is envisaged. No Russian text has been seen. The newly published Russian documents will not be available in the original tongue. The English translation has been made from the German, in which Bezymenski appears to have written it. No explanation is offered of these interesting facts, which suggest a propagandist rather than an historical purpose.

But let us examine the book objectively, on its merits and its claims. How new, how explosive is it? We can best approach this question by summarizing the evidence concerning Hitler’s death which was available before Bezymenski’s book appeared.

The fact of Hitler’s death was first announced privately to the Russian commander in Berlin, General Zhukov, by the German Chief of Staff, General Hans Krebs, on the morning of 1 May 1945. Later in the same day it was published by the German radio, on the orders of Admiral Dönitz, at Flensburg. Next day the Russians took Berlin and the world waited for confirmation and details. None came. Admittedly, by the beginning of June, the Russians in Berlin stated unofficially that they had discovered Hitler’s body and identified it "with fair certainty".

After the war, various misinformation about Hitler's death, which had proved to be untenable, was put into circulation, above all by the Soviet side.  In at least two instances, corpses were "examined" or "identified" by the Soviets, which were demonstrably not Hitler's mortal remains.

-- Werner Maser, "Adolf Hitler"

Apparently, the Soviets tried to find and identify Hitler's corpse several times, albeit unsuccessfully and even with contradictory results.

They also revealed that, before his death, he had married the hitherto unknown Eva Braun. But this brief flicker of unofficial light was soon officially extinguished, and darkness was restored, thicker than ever. Stalin in Moscow, Zhukov in Berlin, pronounced firmly that there was no evidence of Hitler’s death. On the contrary, they said, he was most probably still alive, in Spain or South America. Three months later the Russians became more precise. They accused the British of harboring Hitler in their zone of Germany, with malevolent intent. It was at this point, and as a direct consequence of this accusation, that I was appointed by the British authorities to establish, as far as possible, the truth.

Naturally I realized from the beginning that the Russians possessed vital evidence. It was they who had captured Berlin. It was they who controlled the Chancellery area. They probably had some documents [though they had surprisingly overlooked some]. They certainly had important witnesses. I therefore asked for their co-operation; and in order to make that cooperation easier, I named four witnesses whom I knew to be in their hands: Otto Günsche, Hitler’s S.S. adjutant; Heinz Linge, his personal servant; Hans Baur, his pilot; and Johann Rattenhuber, the commander of his bodyguard. However, all my requests for Russian cooperation were totally ignored, and I was obliged to carry out my inquiry on the basis of Western evidence only.

Fortunately, there was enough of this, I was able to locate and interrogate several witnesses living, captive or free, in the Western zones. I had the documents seized by the British at Flensburg, including the last telegrams from Hitler’s Bunker. Afterwards I was able to add to these Hitler’s two testaments and their companion texts, which were discovered in Western Germany. On this and other evidence I based my conclusions, which were first submitted to the Four Powers and afterwards published in my book, "The Last Days of Hitler".

The Russians showed no interest in my inquiry or my conclusions, and did not welcome my book. Wherever their writ ran, the book was silently banned. A Polish edition was stifled in the press. An edition which was actually printed in Bulgaria was immediately seized and destroyed. As late as 1960, when the British Council organized an exhibition of British books in Moscow, the Russian authorities forbade its opening unless certain books, including "The Last Days of Hitler", were first withdrawn. In all these years the Russians only once, as far as I know, publicly referred to Hitler’s fate. That was in their propaganda-film "The Fall of Berlin", which was first exhibited in 1949. In this film Hitler was incidentally shown taking poison. But even that admission did not last long. After the death of Stalin the film was explicitly condemned by Khrushchev. Its vulgar worship of Stalin, he said, "made one sick"; and it was pulped.

It is a common mistake of totalitarian regimes to suppose that by slamming the front door they can stop anyone from entering the house. They forget the back door and the windows. In fact, long before the Russians broke their own silence, their secrets were out. For in 1955-56 the Russian government at last released its German prisoners, whom it had held since 1945, and these prisoners included those four witnesses of Hitler’s last days whom I had identified but had been unable to interrogate in 1945. I therefore went to Germany and obtained all the evidence that I could, both from them and from certain other newly released prisoners. I found that their evidence did not alter my story, though it might add detail here and there. However, it did enable me to solve one mystery: a mystery not of substance but of method. By interrogating the returned German witnesses, I learned of their experiences in Russian hands, and I was thus able to reconstruct the hitherto secret history of the Russian inquiry into the death of Hitler. I thereupon wrote a full account of this inquiry, which I published as a new introductory chapter to the third British edition of my book [1956]. It has been published in all subsequent impressions and translations.

Briefly, I showed that, immediately after capturing Berlin, the Russians carried out a search of Hitler’s Bunker; that they soon dug up the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun which, as I had surmised, had been buried in a bomb-crater in the Chancellery garden; that they took steps to identify them, and in the end did identify them, by the teeth; and that by the end of May, 1945, they were in possession of all the essential facts. But I also showed that, on 9 June 1945, Stalin intervened. Zhukov in Berlin was then ordered to suppress the facts which he had discovered—and indeed partly revealed. Although he knew that Hitler was dead, he was ordered to maintain in public that he was still alive. This was the background to my inquiry in September, 1945. Then I showed how the inquiry, though stifled in Berlin, had been continued in Moscow, until the Russian government finally yielded to the evidence and, by 1948, had accepted the verdict of their own inquiry of 1945. Between their account and my account there was only one significant difference. Whereas I had accepted the statements of all personal witnesses—both those whom I had interrogated in 1945 and those who had returned from Russian captivity in 1956—that Hitler had shot himself through the head, the Russians maintained that he had poisoned himself with cyanide. I therefore examined this outstanding question and concluded that, on the balance of evidence, "although Hitler may conceivably have taken poison as well, he certainly killed himself with a revolver-shot".

Thus already by 1956 it was established that the Russians had conducted an inquiry and come to certain conclusions. But still they did not admit the inquiry or publish the conclusions. It was not till 1965 that any Russian writer was permitted to break this silence. The first to do so was Yelena Rzhevskaya, who published a somewhat fragmentary and rhetorical article, entitled "Berlin Notes," in a special commemorative number of the Russian periodical "Znamya": an article which she has since extended into a book. Mme. Rzhevskaya wrote with some authority because she had been attached as an interpreter to the Russian unit charged to discover Hitler, alive or dead, in 1945.

In her article, Rzhevskaya described how the Russians had discovered the bodies of Hitler, Eva Braun, Krebs, and the Göbbels family, and also certain important documents, including part of the text of Göbbels’s diaries, a telegram from Bormann to his representative at Obersalzberg, Helmut von Hummel, and a presumed diary of Bormann. She also described the examination of the bodies and the autopsy on them conducted by a Russian army doctor, F. I. Shkarovsky. By this autopsy, she said, it was determined that all had died by cyanide poisoning. She then described the methods used to identify the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun; exactly as I had described them in 1956. But, she added, "by then some of our chiefs, aware of the way the wind was blowing at the top, had lost interest in our investigation".” It was not till 1965 that Rzhevskaya was allowed to see the documents in the case and so enabled to write up her "Berlin Notes".

Even then, it seems, she did not see them all. For instance, she seems not to have realized that German witnesses were available. She evidently knew nothing of the later investigation in Moscow, or of the Western evidence. She afterward admitted that she had never read the public statements—far less the secret interrogations—of Heinz Linge, Hitler’s servant, who had been a Russian prisoner for eleven years. On the other hand she did quote an alleged speculation by Johann Rattenhuber, based on an alleged cryptic remark by Linge, that Linge might have given Hitler the coup de grace with a revolver, after Hitler had taken poison. However, Rzhevskaya only mentions this hypothesis in order to dismiss it. According to the autopsy report, she says, Hitler died of poison, "and the doctors added that they could find no other possible cause of death".

Thus by 1965 my conclusions about the early stages of the Russian inquiry had been confirmed and amplified. The fact of the inquiry in Berlin, and of its suppression by Stalin, had been confirmed. So had my account of the method of identification [by the teeth] and of the conclusion of the inquiry [the death by poison]. The only discrepancy lay still in the difference between that conclusion and my own. I had concluded that Hitler had shot himself, though he might conceivably have taken poison too; the Russians had concluded that he had poisoned himself, though he might conceivably have been shot as well. This difference is not very great or important, and even if it were to be resolved one way or another, such resolution [we may think] would hardly constitute a "sensation," radically altering the received version of events.

Now we can come to Bezymenski. In 1965, it seems, Bezymenski saw that something could be made of Rzhevskaya’s revelations. He therefore wrote a book, "On the Trail of Martin Bormann": a work of crude anti-Western propaganda in which great [and indeed insupportable] weight is given to the Bormann-Hummel telegram and the Bormann diary, first mentioned by Rzhevskaya. He then moved on to Hitler and wrote his present book, which also contains its quota of anti-Western propaganda and also rests heavily (though with the minimum of acknowledgment) on the work of Rzhevskaya. Indeed the bulk of this short book is simply a more prejudiced re-hash of Rzhevskaya’s article. Although Bezymenski adds some decorative detail, his range of evidence is no wider than hers. He too says nothing of the later stages of the inquiry. He too has not questioned witnesses. He too has made no use of Western evidence. If he had, he could have avoided some errors. His independence of mind—as shown by his absurd "explanation" of Stalin’s suppression of the evidence—is no more than we would expect from a Soviet editor. The sole new contribution which he has made is the text of the autopsy reports, which Rzhevskaya claimed to have had in front of her when she wrote, but which Bezymenski now prints "in full," and the sole question which these reports may enable us to answer is the limited, factual question, whether Hitler died by pistolshot or poison.

The first question which we naturally ask is, are the documents genuine? Bezymenski does not offer to authenticate them. He does not say where they are. The original Russian text is apparently not to be divulged, and Bezymenski’s handling of texts, in his book on Bormann, does not inspire unqualified confidence. At one point the autopsy report on Hitler contains an obvious [and admitted] interpolation. A skeptic might ask many questions. Why were these documents suppressed in 1945? Why, and where, have they been hidden for twenty-three years? Why, and by whom, have they been released now? The history of any document contains part of its authority, and any document without a history must be accepted with some reservations.

However, in this instance I am not disposed to be too skeptical. Russian editors, by now, have probably lost the habit of respecting the critical faculty of their readers, and documents may be authentic even if their presentation is unscholarly. I am therefore prepared to assume, for the time being, that these documents are, as stated, "complete and authentic," and fairly translated. The question that we must then ask is, what do they tell us that we did not know before.

The answer is that they give documentary support to the well-known Russian allegation that Hitler died of poison. The doctors who examined his body declared that they had found in his mouth fragments of a crushed glass ampoule, and this, they wrote, "permitted them to conclude" that death was caused by cyanide. On the other hand, once this has been said, certain reservations must be added. To a critical eye the text is not so conclusive as it seems to those who, like Rzhevskaya and Bezymenski, are evidently determined in advance to show that Hitler died not "like a soldier," gun in hand, but by poison "like a dog". And even if it were, there is other evidence which cannot be altogether ignored. The evidence of the Russian doctors, who saw Hitler’s body after it had been "severely charred" and "greatly damaged," must be supplemented by the evidence of the German witnesses who saw it before it had been so disfigured. And these witnesses agree that it had been shot through the head.

What is one to do when two sets of witnesses give apparently incompatible answers to the same question? One solution is to choose which witnesses one will believe and ignore or discredit the others. This is the method of the Russian commentators. Rzhevskaya simply ignores the difficulty. Bezymenski, more boldly, declares that all the German witnesses are liars: they are engaged in a conspiracy to pretend that Hitler died "a soldier’s death". To prove his point he dwells heavily, and uncritically, on some trivial and often unreal discrepancies in their memories, and then casts them aside. He has questioned none of them and is not interested in what they may say. Of what significance are their loose allegations compared with the "hard," scientific evidence of the Russian doctors?

I do not believe that this is a legitimate method. For after all, why should the German witnesses persevere in a false pretense? If Hitler merely poisoned himself, why not say so? Suicide by poison was not "cowardly". Cyanide capsules were issued to German soldiers, for use in extremity, and no one has accused Göring, Himmler, and Ritter von Greim of "cowardice" for using them. Besides, loyalty to Hitler was dissolved by his death. Several witnesses have declared this: once the Führer had deserted them, they said, they felt no further obligation to him. "The Führer is dead: each for himself!" was the cry. And some of those who have described Hitler’s suicide by gunshot, or saw the wound, never had any personal loyalty to him to distort their observation. Therefore, I believe, the evidence of the German witnesses cannot be lightly dismissed. It must be respected.

Besides, if the German evidence, on inspection, is not altogether loose, the Russian evidence, on inspection, is not altogether hard. Rzhevskaya says firmly that the doctors "could find no other possible cause of death" except by poison; but this is not what they certified in the autopsy report. There they wrote not that the evidence compelled but that it "permitted" the conclusion of death by poison. And they included in their report one interesting sentence which reopens the whole question. That sentence reads, "Part of the cranium is missing". No doubt it is because of this inconvenient sentence that Bezymenski involves himself in the most tortuous and evasive part of his whole narrative.

I have mentioned the hypothesis allegedly advanced by Johann Rattenhuber while in Russian captivity, viz: that Heinz Linge, obeying Hitler’s orders, finished his master off, after he had taken poison, with a revolver. We are told nothing of the circumstances in which Rattenhuber made this speculation, or the question to which it may have been the answer. Rattenhuber himself told me that the Russians persecuted him endlessly with silly questions. But presumably, in this instance, they were looking for an explanation of the head wound (the doctors say explicitly that they were "no visible signs of severe lethal injuries" on the body). In other words, they recognized that the head wound could be a gunshot wound and they wanted an explanation of it. Unfortunately, the only "evidence" for Rattenhuber’s alleged guess is another guess: a hypothesis about the hidden meaning of an alleged remark by Linge. Linge is said to have said that, after Hitler’s suicide, he had to carry out "the most difficult order of his life". Linge has since explained, plausibly enough, that this was the order to burn his master’s body. The "evidence" is not, therefore, very convincing. Indeed, Rzhevskaya only mentioned Rattenhuber’s hypothesis in order to reject it as unnecessary and implausible. But then Rzhevskaya simplified her problem by ignoring the head wound which the hypothesis was called in to explain.

So simple a solution cannot be adopted by Bezymenski, who publishes the autopsy report, with its reference to the broken skull. So what does he do? He avoids drawing attention to the difficulty but, in case anyone else notices it, he brings back the old hypothesis. He brings it back, it is true, in a somewhat half-hearted way. After all, if it is to be taken seriously, the Russians should have cross-examined Linge about it. He was at their mercy, for eleven years. But they seem not to have done so. Even now, Bezymenski refused to confront Linge and confute him. When the British Broadcasting Corporation invited Bezymenski to discuss his book on television, he agreed—upon one condition: Linge was not to be there.

Moreover, as if aware of the weakness of the case, Bezymenski clutches at an alternative explanation. "Soviet researchers," he says vaguely, "are of opinion that it was Günsche [i.e., not Linge] who pulled the trigger". Unfortunately it seems that neither these Soviet researchers nor Bezymenski troubled to test their "opinion" by cross-examining Günsche either. And anyway, this hypothesis is even more desperate than the other. For in transferring responsibility for a hypothetical act from Linge to Günsche, Bezymenski has incidentally detached the conclusion from the only shred of "evidence" on which it had rested—the alleged remark to Rattenhuber not of Günsche but of Linge. Having thus confused the issue, Bezymenski falls back on what he regards as the only certainty: the death by poison. Everything beyond this, he says, is mere conjecture. The broken skull is conveniently forgotten.

So there we are, back at Square One. What we are left with is evidence that Hitler shot himself—the evidence of the witnesses and the broken skull, and evidence that a crushed poison-capsule was found in his mouth [the doctors curiously avoid saying whether there was evidence that poison had been swallowed]. This confirms what Artur Axmann deposed as a fact in 1946 and I endorsed as a possibility in 1956, viz: that Hitler put a capsule in his mouth before shooting himself, to make doubly sure. Bezymenski’s book contains some useful corroboration of accepted views, and some interesting circumstantial detail; but it is no bombshell. It is not a "sensation". It does not [as the blurb claims] "end all speculation". It does not "considerably alter the picture which the world has had of Hitler’s death".

What really happened, said Bezymenski, was this: 

"On 2 May 1945, Lt. Col. Ivan Klimenko, a Soviet counter-intelligence officer, led a group of men to the Chancellery in Berlin after hearing reports of burned corpses, said to be those of Hitler and the mistress he married the day before his death, placed them in wooden boxes where they were found by Soviet intelligence officers half-buried in a shell crater near the Berlin Bunker.

"A private, Ivan Churakov, had climbed into a crater strewn with burned paper and saw legs sticking out. The Russians dug into the crater and found the bodies of a man and woman and two dogs. 

"Detailed study of their teeth [both bodies had a number of false teeth] and interviews with their dentists proved that the bodies were those of Hitler and Eva Braun". 

The principal forensic pathologist of the Soviet Forensic Commission was Dr. Faust Shkaravski who performed the autopsy on the two newly recovered bodies. The autopsy reports noted that part of Hitler’s cranium was missing, and that Eva Braun had suffered splinter wounds. But the Soviets attributed Eva Braun’s injuries to fragments from Russian shells exploding in the Chancellery gardens as the bodies were burning. The body of Propaganda Minister Josef Göbbels was also found in the gardens. One of Hitler’s bodyguards later independently pointed out the crater as Hitler’s burial place. 

After the findings of the autopsies were reported to Moscow, Bezymenski wrote, the corpses were "completely burned and their ashes strewn to the wind". ["Associated Press", 13 August 1968] But there were reservations and cloudy remarks on why none of the material had been previously released. [Bezymenski’s 1968 storyline was obviously published only after careful study in Moscow of testimony and grim photos]. 

Quite puzzling was the claim that Adolf Hitler was missing a testicle. None of the doctors that examined Hitler had ever reported on the rather conspicuous condition of monorchism.

After the 20 July plot, although he felt uninjured, Hitler did summon an ear specialist from Berlin, because his hearing was giving him trouble and was suffering from headaches. Dr. Erwin Giesing found out that one eardrum was burst and the other damaged.

Dr. Giesing gave Hitler a full examination:

"Hitler pushed back the bed covers and drew up his night shirt so that I could examine his body. He was generally somewhat emaciated and I detected a distinct meteorism [build up of intestinal gases].... The peritoneal reflexes when tested with a needle seemed very responsive. I then requested Hitler to submit to a neurological control examination to which he agreed. I covered the abdomen with a night shirt and pulled away the bed clothing. I found no abnormalities of the genitals.... The pallid skin was fairly dry with no sweat in the armpits. The triceps and arm reflexes were very responsive either side, the spastic reflexes of the upper extremities negative".

Hitler told Giesing: "I hope that everything will be well again quite soon. Even the intestinal cramps are easing off....."

"Those who saw [Hitler] naked testified he was quite adequate in the nether region. 

'When he went on picnics from the Berghof, one of his greatest pleasures, he would urinate against the trees with the rest of the male entourage, who were naturally interested in Hitler's physical endowments. None of them ever reported that he was lacking in that quarter".

-- Charles Whiting, "Adolf Hitler’s Personal Life"

Observers also cast doubt on why a piece of Hitler’s cranium was reported missing — it was the segment supposedly providing evidence that there was no bullet hole in Hitler’s skull [i.e., his death was by cyanic compounds]. It was rumored Stalin used the piece as an ashtray.

In 1968, Bezymenski said that Hitler’s corpse was cremated and the ashes scattered in 1945. But in a 1992 report that appeared in the "Sunday Express", Bezymenski alleged, “the corpse had been buried and unburied on several occasions before finally being burned in 1970". 

Still, the most confusing fact was that Soviet leader Josef Stalin often claimed the Führer had escaped the Berlin Bunker with the help of British military intelligence. If Stalin knew that Hitler’s burned body had been found, why did he go on spreading reports of the Führer’s escape? Lev Bezymenski claimed that the autopsy results were kept in reserve “in case someone might try to slip into the role of the Führer saved by a miracle".

Otherwise stated, Stalin "knew" that the real Adolf Hitler was dead. But he also presumed that Hitler’s double had escaped with the backing of western security forces.

Historian Asserts Soviet Soldiers Found Hitler's Charred Remains
By Steven Erlanger
The New York Times
18 September 1992

MOSCOW, Sept. 17— A Russian historian said today that the charred remains of Adolf Hitler had been found by Soviet troops soon after the German leader's suicide in 1945, and that his jaw and parts of his skull were still stored in the Soviet archives in Moscow. 

But the historian, Lev A. Bezymensky, said a piece of Soviet archive film supposedly showing Hitler's intact corpse, shown Tuesday night on Russian television, was known not to show the body of Hitler at all.

The film caused a sensation because by virtually all accounts Hitler's body was doused with fuel and burned after he committed suicide in his command Bunker in Berlin on 30 April 1945. 

In an interview, Mr. Bezymensky said the body in the film, which looked like Hitler's and had a bullet hole in its forehead, was found by Soviet troops on 4 May 1945, near the Hitler Bunker. Believing that they might have found the body of the Nazi leader, Soviet officers ordered that the body be filmed, he said. But later that same day, he said, Soviet troops found the actual charred bodies of Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, who committed suicide with him. 

The bodies had been put into a shallow ditch by SS troops in the presence of Josef Göbbels and Martin Bormann, and burned. German troops later buried the bodies in a shell crater with the corpses of Hitler's favorite dogs, Mr. Bezymensky said. 

Stalin had ordered military-intelligence troops to find Hitler, and the double discovery on 4 May was followed by a thorough medical investigation. Mr. Bezymensky said Andrei Smirnov, a former Soviet press attache at the Berlin Embassy who had known Hitler before the war, went to Berlin the same day and declared that the body that had been filmed was not Hitler's. Mr. Bezymensky said the fact was later confirmed by a comparison of dental records. 

But the film was sent to Moscow and was erroneously included in a documentary made just after the war, Mr. Bezymensky said. But later, in another documentary called "Chronicles Without Sensation," the error was identified and corrected. "For specialists, it's a well-known mistake", he said.        

"I'm absolutely sure the body in the film is not Hitler's," Mr. Bezymensky said. "The actual body of Hitler was found in a different place, in the garden of the Chancellery, and that body was identified by the special Soviet commission as Hitler's." 

He said troops of the Soviet Third Army had carried the corpses of Hitler and Braun with them as they advanced westward in the final days of the war, burying and exhuming them as they went. Their last resting place, he said, was in Magdeburg, near the line that later divided East and West Germany.

In an article he published in July in "New Times", Mr. Bezymensky said Stalin had ordered Hitler's jaw and part of his skull brought to Moscow and put into the Soviet archives, though it is not known where they are now.

In 1970 the Magdeburg grave was ordered destroyed by the K.G.B., said Mr. Bezymensky, who has seen the official act ordering the destruction.

Further adding to continuing suspicions are the autopsy reports concerning a missing testicle and superficial accounts of main body organs. Indeed, Bezymenski since has acknowledged that the autopsy reports were false, casting more mystery on Hitler's death. Redlich says, "This only confirms what Western historians and forensic experts suspected: that the Soviet investigation was fraught with deceit, secrecy and incompetence."

Compounding the mystery was how Hitler died. It generally was believed by historians that Hitler bit down on a glass ampoule containing potassium cyanide while shooting himself in the head on 30 April 1945. But Redlich observes, "The question can be raised as to whether Hitler's Parkinson's tremor would have allowed him to follow this procedure" Proving that theory ended after it was learned that Hitler's remains had been transferred nine times from one burial site to another and, finally, to the Lefortove prison in Moscow where they were cremated.

It wasn't until 1973 when two Western experts in forensic dentistry compared Russian medical reports and X-rays of Hitler's teeth that it became evident that the corpse found outside the Bunker indeed was the Führer. For Redlich and others that is enough proof. "It is certain that Hitler, who at present would be over 100 years old, is dead and that he died by suicide. No serious student of history maintains that he escaped with the help of his paladins".

Meanwhile, the definitive proof that the X-Rays of the corpse provided by the Russians to that forensic dentistry team are legitimate, rests in a Russian classified vault. What's inside that archive? Hitler's lower jawbone. At least that's what the Russians claim. Such details no doubt are being added to Hitler's FBI file even now