Hunting Hitler
Page 3
Curiously, the autopsy report published by Bezymenski indicated that the left testicle could not be found anywhere in the body of the male corpse.18 This rather sensational finding was likely highlighted in the Russian autopsy reports because the finding corresponded with popular rumors circulating about Hitler’s supposed sexual dysfunction. Such evidence, however, could not be used to identify the corpse as Hitler’s, because he had never permitted even his personal doctors to examine him so thoroughly. Somehow the Russian pathologists—evidently persuaded by the rumors that Hitler suffered this physical defect to his reproductive biology—believed that including the discussion of the missing testicle would somehow serve as final proof that the body had to be Hitler’s.
Still, despite these problems and inconsistencies, the Russian forensic pathologists relying primarily on the dental evidence were convinced that the two corpses Russian soldier Ivan Churakov found buried in the garden of the Reich Chancellery were the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. Additionally persuasive to Soviet intelligence was the discovery of two German shepherds buried in the Reich Chancellery garden. The larger of the two dogs was found to have died by cyanide poisoning, but only after a capsule amulet had been forced into the dog’s throat, with his jaws held open and the capsule broken open with pliers. The dog also appeared to have suffered fatal brain damage from a severe blow to the head. Why the dog had to be bludgeoned to death in addition to having been poisoned was not clear. Still, the Russian intelligence officers just assumed the larger dog was Hitler’s favorite dog, “Blondi,” who had been given a cyanide capsule to prove to Hitler that the poison pills worked.
“The circumstances of the death of Hitler, Goebbels, and others had been thoroughly examined by the medical experts,” Bezymenski concluded, noting that top officials in Moscow, including Field Marshall Zhukov and Joseph Stalin, were informed of the results in May 1945. Still, Stalin remained unconvinced that the forensic evidence from the autopsy proved Hitler was dead. In December 1945, Stalin ordered the initiation of “Operation Myth” to interview any and all witnesses of Hitler’s last days who could be tracked down and found. What we will discover in the next chapter is that the eyewitness phase of “Operation Myth” raised more questions than it solved, if only because eyewitness testimony produced multiple and generally conflicting versions of Hitler and Eva Braun’s last hours. In the concluding section of his 1968 book, Bezymenski was forced to acknowledge that the testimonial evidence obtained by the “Operation Myth” investigation was anything but conclusive. Still, Bezymenski leaves no doubt that the forensic evidence discovered by the medical pathologists at the laboratory was sufficient to convince him that the bodies belonged to Hitler and Eva Braun.
The strange journey of the Hitler and Eva Braun corpses
In 1992, award-winning Russian television journalist Ada Petrova approached Anatoli Prokopenko, then the director of the Russian “special archive” that housed the autopsy records, files from “Operation Myth,” and Hitler’s skull fragments. In 1992, the Russians were still enjoying the relative openness experienced in the Soviet Union under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev. Ruling Russia from 1985 to 1991 as general secretary of the Communist Party, Gorbachev had launched a dual program of perestroika, or “restructuring,” and glasnost, or “openness,” during which Russia relaxed state security in favor of instituting a policy of sharing information more openly than had been traditional under communist rule. Under perestroika and glasnost, foreign journalists were given access to state secrets and government archives with an openness that had been unimaginable under previous leaders like Stalin.
In discussions with Petrova, Prokopenko dropped the bombshell that Hitler’s skull was “right here in Moscow.” In 1993, Petrova and British journalist Peter Watson were given access to the special archive and were allowed to examine Hitler’s skull fragments. They published their findings in London and New York in a 1995 book entitled The Death of Hitler: The Full Story with New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives.19 Petrova and Watson were the first journalists to be shown the entire “Operation Myth” archive, including the six buff-colored files of documents, plus the charts and photographs mounted on blue boards. Finally, Petrova and Watson published photographs of Hitler’s skull fragments, which had been kept unseen for decades under lock and key in a building Petrova and Watson described as “a grey, eight-story building on Bolshaya Pirogoskaya Street that some say resembles a granary tower.”20
Petrova and Watson discovered in the archive records that the two corpses discovered in the garden of the Reich Chancellery had been moved, buried, and reburied multiple times following the autopsy conducted by the Russians in the pathology laboratory at Buch on May 8, 1945. On June 3, 1945, the secret archives documented that the bodies of Hitler, Eva Braun, the Goebbels family, and General Krebs were moved to the German province of Brandenburg, in the vicinity of Ratenow, where they were buried at a depth of 1.7 meters (approximately 5.8 feet) in a forest near the village of Neu Friedrichsdorf. Then, on February 23, 1946, the documents indicated that the pit in the forest was dug up, and the now half-rotted corpses in their wooden box caskets were moved to the German city of Magdeburg on the Elbe River, where officials from SMERSH counter-intelligence reburied the bodies near the place of deployment of the Soviet Third Army of Occupation troops. The grave, in a courtyard at 36 Westerndstrasse, was located near the southern wall of a courtyard at a depth of 2 meters. The graves were paved over when the street was re-engineered and renamed Klausenerstrausse. There the bodies remained until 1970, when the SMERSH counter-intelligence unit was recalled to East Germany.21
The “Operation Myth” secret files reported that before relocating back to Russia, the head of the Soviet Third Army of Occupation stationed at Magdeburg, wanting instructions regarding the disposition of the bodies, wrote to Yuri Andropov, the future secretary general of the Russian Communist Party who was then the head of the KGB, a Soviet intelligence agency that had emerged out of preceding Soviet military intelligence units that were SMERSH competitors. On March 26, 1970, Andropov replied with orders to disinter the bodies, burn them, and dispose of the ashes. His instructions were carried out on April 4, 1970. The report on the opening of the grave read as follows: “Five wooden boxes positioned crosswise had rotted away, turned into a ‘jellied mass,’ the remains all mixed with earth.”22 The bone fragments of Hitler and Eva Braun had gotten mixed up with those of Krebs, the Goebbels family, and the two dogs, such that sorting them apart had become impossible. Shipped to Moscow were the four fragments of Hitler’s skull and the two fragments of his jaw that Petrova and Watson found in the special archives in Moscow. On April 5, 1970, in a dump near Schönebeck, some seven miles from Magdeburg, what was left of the bodily remains were burned into embers, with the ashes scattered into one of the tributaries of the Elbe River.
Petrova and Watson also discovered that the grave in the garden of the Reich Chancellery where the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were originally found was in reality a pit created by an aircraft bomb, such that the fragments of the Hitler skull were found at a depth of fifty to sixty meters (some 164 to 195 feet) below ground, whereas the two bodies were found at a depth of one to two meters. The skull fragments that could easily have come from a different body altogether were associated with the Hitler corpse only because a piece of the skull was found to be missing from his body. A document in the secret file dated May 31, 1946, recorded the investigation of the skull fragments as follows:
“Earth is attached to the fragments. The back of the skull and the temple part show signs of fire; they are charred. These fragments belong to an adult. There is an outgoing bullet hole. The shot was fired either in the mouth or the right temple at point blank range. The carbonization is the result of the fire effect, which badly damaged the corpse.”23
The skull fragments were assumed to be Hitler’s, despite the obvious bullet-hole exit wound that indicated that the person to whom the skull belonged had most likely di
ed from a gunshot wound. As noted above, the forensic pathologists at Buch ignored the gunshot wound evidence when they concluded that Hitler had died from cyanide poisoning.
Upon examining the autopsy records as well as the documents in the “Operation Myth” file, Petrova and Watson found that the dental evidence was not as immediately convincing as the case presented by Bezymenski. The special archive files failed to contain the detailed X-rays and dental reports Bezymenski claimed had been found. Moreover, Dr. Hugo Blaschke, Eva Braun’s dentist, told the Allies that he last treated Braun in March 1945 and that her teeth were in good shape, with few fillings and no cavities. In particular, Blaschke’s records indicated that the upper right molar, which was intact on the corpse, should have had a filling if it had been Braun’s. Petrova and Watson concluded from the testimony of Käthe Heusermann, Dr. Blaschke’s dental assistant, and Fritz Echtmann, the dental technician who claimed to have crafted a special bridge for Braun, that two identical bridges had been made, with the second held in reserve should anything go wrong with the first. Petrova and Watson were suspicious that the bridge found in Eva’s mouth may have been recovered from the Chancellery dental office and placed into the mouth of the “decoy” corpse to make the Russian doctors conducting the autopsy believe the body was Braun’s. That any X-rays, dental records, or back-up dentures were found in the Reich Chancellery dental office given the bomb damage from air and artillery, plus the vandalism the building suffered from Russian troops, strains credibility.
Yet in the final analysis, Petrova and Watson chose to side with the testimony of Käthe Heusermann, concluding that the recollections of Dr. Blaschke were not reliable.24 In the final analysis, they concluded that the evidence in the Moscow special archive convinced them that the bodies found were Hitler and Eva Braun.
Questions and documents
A BBC/Discovery Channel documentary, Hitler’s Death: The Final Report, produced in 1995, raised additional questions suggesting “Operation Myth” was not the closed case that both Lev Bezymenski had argued in his 1968 blockbuster and Petrova and Watson concluded in their book published in 1995. The documentary featured British historian Norman C. Stone, former adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, then a professor at Oxford. Moscow also gave Stone permission to study the files of “Operation Myth,” including the autopsy. “In the first place, the autopsy was a bit sloppy,” Stone explained on camera. “They’re in a hurry. It’s VE-night. The second thing is, I suspect, the fact that they [the autopsy physicians] were being leaned on by somebody simply to say, ‘He [Hitler] didn’t shoot himself, he munched on poison,’ and that he killed his wife first of all. It sounds like good propaganda, and I suspect they [the autopsy physicians] were leaned on. Doctors in the Stalin system were leaned on. We can demonstrate it.”25 The BBC/Discovery Channel documentary further argues that Käthe Heusermann sketched a diagram of Hitler’s teeth from memory, discounting that X-rays or extensive records of Hitler’s dental work had been found. That Heusermann’s diagram resembled almost exactly the dental specimens found during the autopsy suggested that Heusermann had been shown the dental specimens before she was asked to recreate a drawing of how she “remembered” Hitler’s dental work had been done.
Stalin, refusing to accept the medical findings in Dr. Shkravaski’s forensic report from the autopsy of the Hitler and Braun corpses, became enraged when Field Marshall Zhukov, the Russian hero of the Battle for Berlin, continued to make public statements that the Russians had proof Hitler and Eva Braun were dead. Stalin dispatched Andrei Vyshinsky, the notorious prosecutor from the Moscow show trials of the 1930s, to Berlin with a mission to bring Zhukov in line with his official conclusion. On June 6, 1945, with Vyshinsky at his side, Zhukov held a press conference in Berlin at which he announced, “Hitler’s present whereabouts are unknown.” He denied reports circulating in Berlin that the Soviets had found a corpse they were able to identify as Hitler’s. “Based on personal and official information, we can only say that Hitler had a chance to get away with his bride,” Zhukov told the press, adding that he now believed Hitler had fled Berlin at the very last minute. Zhukov made it clear that it was his personal view that Hitler had taken refuge in Spain.26
One additional point worth clarifying is evidence that Hitler used a double. In 1992, a Soviet archive film played on Russian television showing the 1945 film footage taken by Russian troops on May 4, 1945, with a corpse they assumed was Hitler with a bullet hole in the forehead. This prompted Lev Bezymenski to give an interview to the New York Times to set the record straight. Bezymenski told the newspaper that Andrei Smirnov, a former Soviet press attaché at Russia’s embassy in Berlin who had known Hitler before the war, went to Berlin and declared that the body that had been filmed was not Hitler’s. Bezymenski explained that the film had been sent to Moscow and was erroneously included in a documentary made just after the war. “I’m absolutely sure the body in the film is not Hitler’s,” Bezymenski told the newspaper. “The actual body of Hitler was found in a different place, in the garden of the Chancellery, and that body was identified by a special Soviet commission as Hitler’s.”27
In 2000, the year in which Russia celebrated the 55th anniversary of the fall of Berlin, a four-inch fragment of Hitler’s skull, showing the bullet hole, was for the first time put on public display, under glass at the State Archive of the Russian Federation in Moscow as part of an exhibition entitled “The Death Throes of the Third Reich: The Retribution.” Also on display were trophies including Hitler’s and Goebbel’s personal papers, the diary of Hitler’s daily activities maintained by Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann, the surrender agreement ending the Soviet-German war, several of Hitler’s uniforms, and a blood-stained section of the sofa where Hitler supposedly shot himself after swallowing the cyanide capsule. No mention in the exhibit was made of the inconsistency that the autopsy conducted in Buch, Germany, on May 8, 1945, listed the cause of Hitler’s death as cyanide poisoning, and made no mention of Hitler having shot himself. All these artifacts were from the State “Special Archives,” as well as the holdings of the Foreign Ministry and the Russian Federal Security service.28
That same year, in 2000, Russia permitted for the first time the publication in Moscow of an extensive collection of Hitler records, including Soviet army field reports documenting the discovery of the Hitler and Eva Braun corpses, various autopsy reports, and extensive signed statements from various eyewitnesses to Hitler’s last days drawn from the “Operation Myth” files. In 2005, three Russian academics – V. K. Vinogradov, J. F. Pogonyi, and N.V. Teptozov – were given unrivalled access to the KGB Archives, including the top “Operation Myth” documents, with the goal of publishing an English translation of the Hitler files in the 2005 book entitled Hitler’s Death: Russia’s Last Great Secret from the Files of the KGB.29 “Before the discovery of DNA, it was difficult, if not impossible, to conclusively ascertain that the charred remains found under a layer of soil in the bomb crater ten feet from the garden entrance to the Führerbunker were the corpses of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun,” British historian Andrew Roberts wrote in the foreword to the book, seemingly with prescience at what was yet to develop. “Yet the work of the Soviet intelligence services (principally SMERSH) in piecing together all the evidence for the couple’s final moments—as well as the incontrovertible dental evidence set out in pages 95 to 107—put the established historical record beyond any reasonable doubts.”30
In 2009, the conclusion that the historical record and medical forensic evidence established with scientific certainty that Hitler and Eva Braun died in Berlin as the Russian army was approaching the Reich Chancellery was forcibly challenged.
The skull of a 40 year-old woman
In 2009, Mystery Quest produced a DVD-documentary for the History Channel, entitled Hitler’s Escape, and gained permission to access the Hitler secret archives.31 Intensive negotiations with Russian officials resulted in Dr. Nicholas Bellantoni, the state archaeologist of Connecticut,
being allowed one hour to view the Hitler skull fragments (sections taken from the bloodstained couch on which Hitler supposedly shot himself) as well as the files from “Operation Myth.” Bellantoni flew to Moscow to undertake the investigation, and video from the MysteryQuest documentary shows him walking into the Russian Federation State Archive building to examine the evidence.
The documentary next shows Bellantoni working in a small office within the archives building, putting on white rubber gloves and using cotton swabs to take blood samples from five different sections of the sofa, making sure to place each swab in a separate envelope to avoid cross-contamination. Next, Bellantoni can be seen examining the Hitler skull fragments. On camera, Bellantoni identifies what looks like a bullet exit wound on the skull, using his hand to point out that the skull fragment came from the occipital-parietal region of the back of the head. Using a special chart to look at bone color and cracking, Bellantoni graded the skull, determining that it showed signs of having been exposed to fire, but concluding the skull had not burned for long—certainly not long enough for a cremation. With time running out, Bellantoni took several high-resolution photographs of the skull and made various sketches. Finally, he gathered four samples of the skull for laboratory testing. He brought the evidence back to the genetics laboratory of the University of Connecticut Center for Applied Genetics and Technology for processing and testing.