| Death of Hitler By: Alexandre Bilodeau
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.
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 A 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. 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.
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.
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 |
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Source: CIA Article
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 28 May 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. Next, Stalin dispatched Andrei Vyshinsky, the notorious prosecutor in the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s, to Berlin to brief Marshal Georgy Zhukov on the new line on Hitler. (Zhukov said on record that he believed Hitler was dead.) The Soviet marshal was at the height of his fame and popularity, and had been called the greatest Russian commander since Suvorov. For Stalin, who feared and usually eliminated potential rivals, it was time to cut him down to size. At a 9 June press conference--the first since the Western press had been allowed into the Soviet-controlled city--Zhukov, with Vyshinsky at his side, offered a new version of Hitler's fate. The Führer's "present whereabouts are unknown," he said. Zhukov denied reports circulating in Berlin that the Soviets had found a corpse that "could be Hitler's." He added that: "Based on personal and official information, we can only say that Hitler had a chance to get away with his bride [Eva Braun, who married the Führer hours before they committed suicide]. Hitler could have flown out at the very last minute." Zhukov's "personal view" was that Hitler had taken refuge in Spain. The new Soviet version went out over the press wires the next day, providing grist for hundreds if not thousands of Hitler sightings for many years to come. Vyshinsky then accompanied Zhukov to Frankfurt, where the marshal briefed Gen. Eisenhower on the new Soviet line. Eisenhower later told the press that he had changed his mind about Hitler and believed the Nazi dictator might still be alive.
None of this would have occurred if there had been a corpus delecti. Or would it have? Even with a corpse in better condition at hand, would Stalin have buried and reburied the body, as he did the remains, to cover up the evidence of Hitler's death? What about the skull fragments? The first autopsy noted that a piece of the cranium was missing. In early 1946, a Smersh unit sent to search the area where Hitler's remains had been found discovered the fragments, and apparently they fit the skull that had been examined in Buch. We do not know when or how the skull fragments reached Moscow. We do know that they were stored in the NKVD/KGB/FBS archives and that their existence was not revealed until 1995--and then only in the West, and not in Russia until this past April! Today, just as in 1945, the skull fragments may hold the final answer. Genetic testing should be able to determine once and for all whether they are the missing pieces of Hitler's cranium. Some of Hitler's closest relatives disappeared into Stalin's Gulag, but others, including several of his closest relatives living in the United States, survived. The Russian government, however, cannot afford expensive test procedures; although it is willing to let someone else pick up the tab. So far, no one has offered to do so. In the final analysis, this lack of interest in Hitler and the end of the Third Reich, while disappointing to historians, may not be a bad thing. Benjamin Fischer, |