The shot nobody heard
In 1978, journalist James P. O’Donnell published The Bunker: The History of the Reich Chancellery Group, based on his firsthand experience with the Führerbunker and his interviews with fifty surviving eyewitnesses to Hitler’s final hours.66 Having served as a Signal Corps intelligence officer with the US Army in World War II, O’Donnell was discharged on July 2, 1945, at which point he accepted a job as Newsweek’s bureau chief.
On July 4, 1945, after arriving in Berlin, O’Donnell bribed the two Soviet soldiers guarding the Führerbunker with a gift of American cigarettes, thus becoming one of the first Americans to gain entrance to the underground chambers. Once inside, O’Donnell was surprised to find a treasure trove of Nazi documents, including Hitler’s daybook, which had been overlooked by the Soviets in their mad dash to find Hitler’s body.
It was not until 1972, more than a quarter-century after the end of World War II, that O’Donnell returned to Germany to conduct some fifty in-person interviews between 1972 and 1976 with those eyewitnesses to Hitler’s final days who were still alive and able to speak intelligently about their experiences with Hitler. “From the beginning of my long journey down the autobahn into the past, I realized I was operating on the very outer fringes of time and human memory, including my own,” O’Donnell honestly admitted.67
One of the most startling revelations in O’Donnell’s book comes from Erich Kempka, who admitted that he was not in the bunker to hear any shot fired, undermining the testimony that accounts since the event (including the “authoritative” account rendered by Trevor-Roper) had relied upon to be truthful. Kempka told O’Donnell that when Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves, he was just returning from the mission to bring back the gasoline that Major Guensche had sent him to find. Here was Kempka’s story in 1974, when O’Donnell interviewed him:
Yes, Major Guensche is right. He had sent me off to round up at least two hundred liters of gasoline, ten jerry cans, but I was able to find only six or seven in my Reich Chancellery garage. I “pumped” [that is, borrowed] two more from Cheftechniker Hentschel. I was thus on my way back to the Führerbunker when I met up with the funeral cortège. That lout Bormann was carrying the body of Eva Braun, clutching her breast with his apelike paw. Somehow this maddened me. He was carrying her as if she were a sack of potatoes. Just as they all started to ascend the staircase, I reached the bottom. So, I grabbed the body of Eva Braun Hitler from Bormann and began to carry her up the stairs myself. I think if Bormann had resisted my effort, I would have hauled off and clobbered him, but he made no protest.68
When O’Donnell asked Kempka why his story had changed, Kempka responded, “That was 1945. It is now 1974. So let me level with you. Back in ’45, to save my own skin, I told American and British interrogators just about anything or everything I thought they wanted to hear. Since they kept grilling me about ‘that shot’ I finally told them that I heard it. It seemed to make things easier.”69 O’Donnell described Kempka, who died in 1975, as “a primitive, vulgar, thoroughly unpleasant man,” who was a notorious drinker that liked to brag about his numerous sexual conquests.70
The 2009 documentary, Hitler’s Escape, sent experts into the Führerbunker to determine whether the construction of the facility would have permitted a shot to be heard with the door closed to Hitler’s private rooms. The conclusion was that if the thickness of the walls and the construction of the bunker prevented the loud noise of the diesel generators used in the bunker to produce electricity from being heard, then it was extremely unlikely a pistol shot within the private rooms with the door closed could have been heard by those standing in the hallway outside.71
Hitler doppelgängers
In 1995, British physician Hugh Thomas, an expert on gunshot wounds, published The Murder of Adolf Hitler: The Truth about the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker, in which he directly grappled with the evidence that the corpses found in the Führerbunker were doppelgängers—stand-in doubles for Hitler and Eva Braun—and explored whether the eyewitness testimony of Hitler’s last hours was so conflicting and contradictory as to suggest the eyewitnesses were covering up a deeper crime.72
Thomas dismissed the corpses the Russians found, noting that in the toxicological tests there was no evidence of cyanide residue, or any other poison, in the tissues of “Hitler’s body,” and that cause of death in the “Eva Braun” corpse was found to be due to a massive shrapnel wound in the chest. That the dental records match in both instances, Thomas attributed to dental fixtures being forged such that duplicate dentures were manufactured for Eva Braun and shoved in the mouth of the female corpse, while for Hitler a jaw was manufactured to recreate the dental bridges documented in his dental records, as well as in the five X-ray plates of Hitler’s head allegedly belonging to his physicians Dr. Theodor Morell and Erwin Giesing that were found in the US National Archives in 1972.73
Regarding the eyewitness testimony, Thomas was equally dismissive. “The whole story of the alleged suicides of Hitler and Eva in the Bunker is totally farcical,” he wrote. “The testimony of every single witness is badly tainted; not one witness is credible. There is, moreover, a far greater than normal incidence of changed testimony. This could be partially explained by several factors: the need for conformity, media pressure, or monetary gain.”74 Noting that by 1995 there were in print “a considerable number of conflicting testimonies” about precisely how Hitler and Eva Braun died, Thomas discredited all eyewitness accounts with the following: “Some of these [eyewitness accounts] are confused, some are deliberately duplicitous; very few are unchanged.”75
Realizing that Kempka admitted in 1974 that he had lied forced Thomas to reevaluate the claimed “authenticity” of Trevor-Roper’s 1947 book, The Last Days of Hitler. The truth was that Kempka was not even in the bunker when Hitler and Eva Braun supposedly committed suicide, so it was impossible for Kempka to have heard a pistol shot. As a consequence, Thomas dismissed Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1947 book and the entire British propaganda campaign that accompanied the publication of the book as fiction at best, “based on the false testimony of one man.”76
Thomas speculated that Eva Braun had tried unsuccessfully to kill herself by cutting her wrists. He imagined that Linge offered Hitler a cyanide capsule and the use of his pistol, but when Hitler refused to kill himself, Lange obliged him by strangling Hitler to death. After reviving Eva Braun, the conspirators in the bunker helped her escape, Thomas explained. What makes this hypothesis interesting is that Thomas thought the alternative that the eyewitnesses in the bunker had conspired to murder Hitler was the only way to explain why their testimony was so contradictory.
The puzzle Thomas was trying to solve was why all the countless hours of eyewitness testimony taken at the end of the war by American, British, and Russian intelligence, and subsequently over several decades by credible authors and journalists, amounted to nothing more than storytelling. What Thomas is trying to cope with is answering the riddle about why those close to Hitler in his final days and hours would go to such lengths to convince the world that they had witnessed Hitler’s suicide. But instead of trying to cover up a murder, one equally plausible explanation that Thomas did not consider is that none of the Nazi witnesses wanted to let on about their complicity in allowing Hitler and Eva Braun to escape.
While the accounts told by the various eyewitnesses vary significantly in important details—so much so as to make none of the accounts believable—the eyewitnesses generally adhered to the same basic story. In all the accounts, Hitler and Eva Braun enter their private rooms in the Führerbunker and kill themselves in one way or another by pistol shots, cyanide capsules, or some combination. Both are discovered dead. Their bodies are taken outside and cremated. Clearly, the only solution for the eyewitnesses that would end the investigation by closing the case depended upon the world believing that Hitler had died in the Führerbunker, unable to escape Berlin.
If the eyewitnesses in the Führerbunker were guilty of a conspira
cy, it is unlikely to have been a conspiracy to murder Hitler. More likely, the conspiracy was arranged for all to tell their version of the Hitler suicide story. If the eyewitnesses in the Führerbunker were found to have been co-conspirators in the effort to get Hitler and Eva Braun safely out of Berlin, who knows what reprisals the Allies, and especially the Russians, might have visited upon them? While not precisely a capital crime, helping the most genocidal maniac the world had ever known to escape would have been a crime not easily excused, especially not in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust it occasioned.
______________
35 Lev Bezymenski, The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from the Soviet Archives, op.cit., pp. 68-69.
36 “The Appeal by Grand-Admiral Dönitz,” May 2, 1945, reprinted in V. K. Vinogradov, J. F. Pogonyi, and N. V. Teptozov, Hitler’s Death, op.cit., pp. 146-147, at p. 147.
37 Associated Press Report, “Nazi Report Says Hitler is Dead; Admiral Doenitz Is Announced as Successor,” Daytona Morning Journal, Wednesday, May 2, 1945, front page, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1873&dat=19450502&id=1fonAAAAIBAJ&sjid=6sYEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2038,6693743. The AP report was printed by newspapers across the United States; Dönitz’s name was printed in the alternative English-language transcription as “Doenitz.”
38 “Hitler: The Cremation,” Newsweek, July 2, 1945, p. 24. Parentheses were added to the original for clarification.
39 US Army, typewritten instructions, no title, dated Oct. 1, 1945. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Silver Spring, MD, Reg. No. 319, Stack Area 270, Row 84, Compartment 7, Entry (A1) 134-B, Personal Name File, Boxes 295-297.
40 Headquarters of the US Forces, European Theater, Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, G-2, “Subject: Investigation of Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Adolf Hitler,” Oct. 2, 1945, signed Dupre Sassard, Lt. Col., GSC Executive. NARA, op.cit., see footnote #4.
41 Stefan Collini, “Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography by Adam Sisman,” The Guardian, July 16, 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/17/hugh-trevor-roper-biography-review.
42 Robert Harris, Selling Hitler: The Extraordinary Story of the Con Job of the Century – The Faking of the Hitler “Diaries” (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
43 Stefan Collini, Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography by Adam Sisman, loc.cit.
44 H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947).
45 Ibid., p. 196.
46 Ibid., p. 197. Parenthesis added for clarity.
47 Ibid., p. 198.
48 Ibid., p. 201.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., p. 202.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., p. 205.
53 Ibid., p. 206.
54 Ibid.
55 Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler – The Case Presented (New York: Sterling, 2011), pp. xxi – xxii.
56 Robert Harris, Selling Hitler: The Extraordinary Story of the Con Job of the Century – the Faking of the Hitler “Diaries” (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 44.
57 Michael A. Musmanno, Ten Days to Die (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1950).
58 “Musmanno Collection – Interrogations of Hitler Associates,” Gumberg Library Digital Collections, Duquesne University, http://digital.library.duq.edu/cdm-musmanno/.
59 Ibid., pp. 215-216.
60 Ibid., p. 216.
61 Ibid., p. 219.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., p. 233.
64 Bezymenski, The Death of Hitler, op.cit., p. 71.
65 Ibid., pp. 71-71.
66 James P. O’Donnell, The Bunker: The History of the Reich Chancellery Group (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1978).
67 Ibid., p. 17.
68 Ibid., p. 226. Brackets in original.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid., p. 227.
71 MysteryQuest, Hitler’s Escape, produced by the A&E Television Networks studio and shown first on The History Channel, September 2009, loc.cit.
72 Hugh Thomas, The Murder of Adolf Hitler: The Truth about the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995); published first in Great Britain under the title, Doppelgängers: The Truth about the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker (London: Fourth Estate Limited, 1995).
73 Ibid., Chapter 3, “The Discovery of the Corpses – Forensic Fraud,” pp. 123 – 151, with particular attention to p. 150.
74 Ibid., p. 112.
75 Ibid., p. 90. Brackets added for clarity.
76 Ibid., p. 96.
3
“WHERE IS ADOLF HITLER?”
Why, then, is it generally accepted that Hitler is dead? No one in the west ever saw Hitler’s corpse.
—Glenn B. Infield, Hitler’s Secret Life (1979)77
“Where is Adolf Hitler?” was the only question asked by the first Soviet Union troops to enter the Führerbunker.
Not finding the Führer there, the victorious Russian soldiers ransacked the place. US Army Signal Corps intelligence officer James P. O’Donnell, when he arrived at the Führerbunker on July 4, 1945, two months later, was shocked to find there was nothing of any intrinsic value left. “No full liquor bottles, no usable weapons, no blankets or articles of clothing, no dress daggers, radios, or cameras.”78 Describing the abandoned bunker as looking like “the Paris flea market after an auction sale,” O’Donnell was shocked to find a mass of printed material still in the bunker—military telephone books and telephone-number pads, loose-leaf notebooks, business office files and dossiers, Hitler’s appointment book and Martin Bormann’s personal diary, military manuals, scratch pads, and letters.
What was wrong with this picture? O’Donnell noted that the Germans had always been meticulous in destroying even minor pieces of evidence, and above all, printed matter, when abandoning a headquarters or signal center. “Whenever they had time, they [the Nazi military] had usually blown up a signal center,” he wrote. “Bored soldiers make doodles and jottings on paper. This habit can betray a code, a radio frequency, a call sign.”79
O’Donnell concluded the Russians had committed “an intelligence oversight of major importance.”80 But the reason was easily discerned. “At least five Red Army search teams had been in the bunker the day it fell,” he noted. “They had been looking for only one thing: the body.”
Photographic evidence
William Vandivert, then a 33-year-old Life magazine photographer, was the first Western photographer to gain access to the Führerbunker on July 3, 1945.81 Vandivert followed Life magazine correspondent Percy Knauth and two other army-uniformed war correspondents with his camera as they inspected the Führerbunker and the garden area in the Reich Chancellery above.
One of the more important photos taken inside the bunker shows the three correspondents inspecting a couch stained with blood by candlelight. What is startling is that the bloodstain forms little more than a narrow streak on the left arm of the couch with what appears to be some staining of the seat cushion immediately below the left arm. But if this is where Hitler sat to shoot himself in the mouth, the physical evidence does not support the conclusion that he killed himself with any pistol shot to the head, regardless of whether he shot himself in the right temple, left temple, or mouth. Self-inflicted pistol shots to the head are typically inflicted at point-blank range, with the pistol pressed directly against the side of the head or inserted into the mouth. The resulting exit wound sends a broad spew of brain tissue, blood, and bone out the side or back of the head, typically at high velocity, creating a massive splatter pattern on whatever objects are in the path. In this particular photo, there is no splatter from the head wound visible on the couch or the corner walls against which the couch was pushed. There are no indications whatsoever of blood stains on the other arm of the couch or on the wall behind, making it extremely unlikely that Eva Braun killed herself with a pistol shot to the heart while sitting there. Except for the one streak of blood mentioned above, the couch and the roo
m where the couch was found are devoid altogether of bloodstains on the walls or floor.
Another photograph, not originally published in the magazine, shows the correspondents in the garden area outside the bunker, crouching as they examine a shallow trench where, the correspondents had been told, the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were burned after their suicides. The problem with this photograph is that the ditch does not look wide enough for two bodies to be placed side-by-side, and the debris in the trench suggests no bodies had been placed there head-to-toe. Moreover, there is no indication the ground had been burned by the gasoline-fueled fire described by various eyewitnesses who had supposedly viewed the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun being cremated there. Nor is there any evidence from the relatively ordered wood debris filling the garden around the ditch that the area was ever subjected to the type of heavy artillery bombardment needed to have destroyed and buried the bodies in a series of direct hits that dislodged enough surrounding earth to create craters and fill graves. Interestingly, in his typed notes describing these photographs, Vandivert inserted by hand the word “supposedly” into the typewritten sentence, so that it read with the addition as follows: “ … closeup of ditch where Hitler and Eva ‘supposedly’ burned.”
A third picture that shows Knauth and the other two army correspondents entering a door leading down to the bunker gives a more panoramic view of the garden area, making it clear that the area has not experienced massive bomb or artillery damage. Except for the shallow ditch observed in the second photo, there are no bomb craters visible. The garden observed in this third photograph bears no resemblance to the artillery-bombarded garden described in the eyewitness testimony discussed in the previous chapter.
A subsequent fourth photograph, also not originally published in Life, shows three empty gasoline cans that the photograph caption says were reportedly used by SS troops to burn the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. No other gasoline cans are visible in any of Vandivert’s photographs of the garden outside the bunker. Yet these three cans of gasoline would have contained barely enough fuel to set the corpses aflame, and certainly not enough to obliterate the bodies by cremating them to ashes.
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