The Seventh Secret

by Irving Wallace

  Emily continued through the file of correspondence. She found the copy of her letter in which she had written to Dr. Thiel that she intended to go on with her father's investigation, and that she needed Dr. Thiel's help. He was crucial to her research, she had written him, and it was imperative that she meet with him. Paperclipped to her letter was Dr. Thiel's curt one-sentence reply. "Dear Miss Ashcroft, I am sorry I can-not see you or anyone else about this matter."

  Then something her father had said in their final conversation came back to her. He had said, "Emily, our book must be the last word, the absolute truth, the final word."

  Quixotic? No. He had been onto something.

  Emily put the file aside, resolutely marched into the sitting room, and placed herself before the telephone on the desk. Quickly, she dialed Dr. Max Thiel's number. A ring. Two rings. A pickup.

  An old woman's voice in German. "Yes?"

  "Is this the residence of Dr. Max Thiel?"

  A short silence. "Who is speaking?"

  "I am the daughter of Dr. Harrison Ashcroft. I must speak to Dr. Thiel. I have come from England to speak to him."

  "A moment, please."

  Emily could hear muffled voices in the background. She waited tensely.

  Her father had told her that when he talked to Dr. Thiel on the phone, the dentist's deep voice had been unfaltering and assured. After meeting with Dr. Thiel, her father had reported that the dentist had also been most friendly.

  Yet the voice she heard now, a man's voice, was somewhat less than friendly, even gruff.

  "Who is this?"

  "Dr. Thiel? My name is Emily Ashcroft." Briefly, she told him about herself, and reminded him of her father and their book. "You invited Dr. Ashcroft to call on you. He did so, and found you most cooperative and gracious. I have come to Berlin to follow through on my father's work, Dr. Thiel—" .

  "Please do not use my name on the phone again," he said sharply.

  "I'm sorry. I won't, if you don't wish me to."

  "I don't wish you to. It is unwise."

  She could sense a certain fear in his voice, and expected him to hang up. She spoke quickly. "I have come here to Berlin to talk with you."

  "Impossible."

  "But you saw my father. You were willing to help my father."

  "Look what happened to him," Dr. Thiel responded, more gruffly than before.

  "It was an accident."

  Dr. Thiel's voice softened slightly. "Maybe. Maybe it was an accident. I am not sure." He hesitated. "I am sorry for your loss." Then he added stubbornly, "Anyway, I want to take no risks. Please do not bother me again. You go write what you wish."

  "I wish to write the truth," she said emotionally. She remembered what Nitz had suggested. Use Vogel's account to bait the informant. "I suppose I can only use what Ernst Vogel told me—"

  "Who?"

  "Ernst Vogel. He was an SS sergeant and honor guard at the Führerbunker. He witnessed Hitler's last days. I saw him today. He confirmed what Linge, Giinsche, and Kempka had given as sworn evidence. Vogel insists Hitler shot himself, and that he saw Hitler carried out to the bunker garden and cremated. He backed the standard story. He implied that any other version of Hitler's end could come only from cranks and crackpots."

  Dr. Thiel took the bait. "Vogel is an absolute fool," he snapped with annoyance. "He believes what he was brainwashed to believe. I know of him. He is an idiot guard who never knew Hitler."

  "But you knew Hitler?" she said innocently.

  "Of course I did. Too well."

  "And you knew something else that you had passed on to my father. It's a pity you won't tell me what you told him. Now I'll be forced to perpetuate the lie, not tell the truth, let history remain warped."

  There was a short silence. "Does it really matter after forty years? Let sleeping dogs lie."

  "But you hint that they may not be sleeping," she said passionately. "Yes, I think it does matter that everything about Hitler be known at last. So that such a man will not come among us again. If Hitler is still alive, he must be exposed and punished. He must not be allowed to go free. The truth matters very much, sir. My father thought so. I am his daughter and I think so. Do you believe the Vogels of the world should be allowed to perpetuate their false myths, if indeed they are myths? If there is more to the story, I wish you'd help me. For my father's sake. He was a good man who—"

  "Yes, he was a good man," Dr. Thiel assented. "I found him most charming. But he was a reckless man, and perhaps he paid for it." He hesitated. "Well, now, perhaps I am a reckless man, too. Maybe I can see you for just a little while. If we meet quietly, and no publicity this time."

  "None. I shall be a mouse, I promise you."

  "Very well. You have my address. I have an hour before dinner. Can you come over immediately?"

  "Immediately."

  Emily sat forward on what was the single chair in the small dental laboratory located in the business wing of Dr. Thiel's spacious two-story brick house set back from a wide boulevard called Heerstrasse, west of the river Havel and about twenty-five minutes by taxi from the Kempinski hotel. Dr. Max Thiel sat across from her, perched on a high white stool, one elbow on the Formica counter behind him.

  He was friendly and courteous from the moment of her entrance. He was a tall, stooped man, heron-like, with fine gray hair combed sideways, alert blue eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles, a long horsy face. He wore a dark summer suit, white shirt, plain navy tie pressed against a starched collar. She judged him to be in his eighties.

  After showing her into his laboratory, he had disappeared and returned bringing a tray holding two cups of tea and a plate of cookies sent by his wife, who had not appeared.

  He had lifted him-self onto the stool, noisily sipped at his cup of tea, and finally set the cup aside on the counter before speaking.

  "So, Miss Ashcroft, we are here. Did your father tell you anything of our meeting a few weeks ago?"

  "Nothing, except that whatever you told him excited him, and encouraged him to arrange for an excavation. He indicated that there was too much to go into on the phone, and that he would tell me about it when he returned to Oxford. So I know nothing of what happened between you. Only that it was of great importance."

  "Now you shall know," said Dr. Thiel.

  She leaned toward him with anticipation.

  "You understand, of course, that the Soviets were the only ones to investigate Adolf Hitler's supposed death and burial."

  "Yes, we have the records concerning his autopsy on file at Oxford. I have not reviewed them recently. I was going to study them when I reached the concluding chapter of the Hitler biography."

  "To make the best use of our time, let me summarize for you the findings of the various Soviet investigators. To begin with, you must realize one vital omission in all the evidence. No one actually saw Hitler kill himself. No one saw Eva Braun kill herself. Not one person ever claimed that. We only know the scenario that the Soviets, as well as British, French, and American interrogators, heard from the Germans in and around the Führerbunker in April 1945. We heard the testimony that, with his cause hopeless and the Third Reich crumbling, Hitler planned to kill himself. After that we heard that he and his wife had committed suicide in privacy, had been seen lying dead, had been taken outdoors and put to the torch. But beyond the words of his staff and security guards, there never was any scientific proof that the couple that committed suicide was really Adolf and Eva. To prove a crime, self-inflicted or otherwise, it has generally been the rule of all courts to invoke the need for a corpus delicti—the material substance or body of the victim of violence. In this case there were no bodies—no corpses—to examine. The bodies had been hastily cremated, reduced to flaky ashes and charred bones. Without the bodies, how could any investigators be scientifically certain that Hitler and his wife had ended their lives?"

  "But there was some material evidence," Emily interjected.

  Dr. Thiel nodded. "Some. The Soviet investigator
s were convinced that Hitler and Eva were dead. But I was not convinced that they had actually died."

  Emily's heart leaped at the last words. No wonder her father had been excited. She was becoming excited herself.

  Still, she tried to contain her feelings, make one last feeble attempt at playing the devil's advocate. "Dr. Thiel, what you are saying is that Hitler may have survived and got away. If this happened, how could he have escaped? From transcripts I have seen, on this last day when the Soviets were ringing his bunker, he couldn't have got away on foot or by car. Possibly by airplane. But we were told by Hanna Reitsch, the woman pilot who visited him at the eleventh hour, that she herself flew the last available plane, an Arado-96, out of Berlin. Even Oberführer Hans Bauer, Hitler's own pilot, couldn't find a plane when he was ready to escape. He had to break out on foot and was captured and held in Russia until 1955. Besides, there were no German airfields left to take off from. SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, the commando, testified that there wasn't a single air-port left for the Nazis to use." Emily threw up her hands. "If Hitler survived, how could he have got away?"

  Dr. Thiel's answer was simple. "I don't know, Fräulein Ashcroft. That's for you to find out. All I know, feel certain about, is that Hitler did survive his supposed suicide. He was not cremated that fateful day. The Soviets were wrong in their announcement, and I think I can prove it."

  Once more, Emily felt a surge of hope and a rush of curiosity. In silence she waited for Dr. Thiel's evidence.

  "Let me tell you what the Soviets found, and then I will tell you what I found," continued Dr. Thiel. "On the day before Hitler's supposed death, the Soviet command already inside Berlin organized a small special team of NKVD officers from the Russian Third Assault Army, assisted by a female interpreter named Yelena Rzhevskaya, to find Hitler's whereabouts, to locate Hitler dead or alive. Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Klimenko, a Soviet interrogator, officially led his own team to the Führerbunker. It was known by the Russians that this deep Führerbunker existed, and that Hitler already had spent one hundred five days inside it. Shortly before Klimenko began his search, other Russians had been directed to the Führerbunker, including twelve women doctors from the Red Army Medical Corps and around twenty Soviet officers. They had not been looking for Hitler, only for souvenirs. These booty-hunters confiscated everything from lamps to monogrammed silver-ware to Eva Braun's black satin French brassieres. On May 2, 1945, two days after Hitler's announced demise, Klimenko arrived at the Führerbunker and investigated it. By evening he had examined a male body that an-other team had found stuffed into an oak water tank. He ordered it laid out on the floor of a hall in the Old Chancellery next door and tentatively identified it as Hitler's corpse. Nevertheless, two days later, Klimenko returned to the Führerbunker. In a bomb crater in the Chancellery garden, Private Ivan Churakov had discovered the remains of a man and a woman. 'Of course,' said Klimenko, 'at first I didn't even think that these might be the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun, since I believed that Hitler's corpse was already in the Chancellery and only needed to be identified. I therefore ordered the corpses to be wrapped in blankets and reburied.' Meanwhile, inside the Chancellery, German officers and diplomats who had known Hitler agreed that the first body, now lying on the hallway floor, was not Hitler. Possibly a double. But not the Führer. Then Klimenko remembered the two bodies he had ordered reburied in the bomb crater three meters from the Führerbunker's emergency exit. With a team, in a jeep, Klimenko rushed back to the site. Let me read to you what happened next."

  Dr. Thiel opened a drawer beside him and pulled out a sheaf of papers and some photographic negatives. "And they dug up the two corpses again," said Emily. Dr. Thiel nodded, as he studied his notes. "Yes. The bodies were still wrapped in blankets. The Russians placed the bodies in wooden boxes, and sent them by truck to a field hospital in Berlin-Buch, a suburb of Berlin to the north. Here the extensive autopsies were begun by Soviet specialists."

  "On the bodies?" asked Emily. "But there were no bodies."

  "They weren't bodies in the strictest sense," replied Dr. Thiel. "These were actually remains of bodies. Let me read from the Soviet report. Concerning the male corpse, 'In view of the fact that the corpse is greatly damaged, it is difficult to gauge the age of the deceased. Presumably it lies between fifty and sixty years. The corpse is severely charred and smells of burned flesh. Part of the cranium is missing. Parts of the occipital bone, the left temporal bone, and the upper and lower jaws are preserved. The skin on the face and body is completely missing; only remnants of charred muscles are preserved.' Dr. Thiel looked up. "No skin, therefore no fingerprints available." Dr. Thiel consulted the papers in his hand. "The next report. 'In view of the fact that the body parts are extensively charred, it is impossible to describe the features of the dead woman. The age of the dead woman lies between thirty and forty years.' Again, no fingerprints. However, the Soviet specialists had, they decided, an equally dependable means of identification. They possessed the upper and lower jawbones of both corpses, with teeth and dentures intact."

  "Exactly what did they have to work from?"

  "The male's upper and lower bridges. One had an old-fashioned window crown made of yellow metal, gold, that fitted on a molar. Then there was a gold bridge from Eva Braun's jawbone. The Soviet interpreter, Yelena Rzhevskaya, was able to run down Fräulein Käthe Heusemann, who had been assistant to Hitler's dentist,

  Dr. Hugo Blaschke, and Fritz Echtmann, the dental technician who had made the bridges. Fräulein Heusemann led the investigators to Dr. Blaschke's hospital office in the ruins of the Chancellery. There the last X rays of Hitler's and Braun's teeth were located, and these were compared to the bridges from the corpses that the Soviets kept in an old cigar box inside a satchel. The actual bridges matched the earlier X rays of Hitler's and Braun's teeth. While the Soviet Forensic Medical Commission required only ten matching points for positive identification, the commission claimed to have found twenty-six matching points. From this forensic autopsy, the Soviets announced on July 9, 1945, that they had finally found the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun."

  "But you disagree," said Emily. "You do not believe they found Hitler and Braun. Why?"

  "Because I, too, was one of Hitler's personal dentists. When Hitler no longer trusted Dr. Blaschke with certain specialized work, he brought me in. He wanted no problem with Dr. Blaschke, so my role was kept secret. As a consequence, since my dental work was unknown to others, I was not interrogated by the Soviets. I managed to obtain copies of the reports in which the Soviets explained their positive identification. I was able to compare their findings with my own work on Hitler. The bridges were the same with one minute difference. When I adjusted Hitler's bridges, I had added a tiny almost invisible clasp to Hitler's upper plate to make it fit snugly on the gold crown. This tiny clasp was not on the bridge that the Soviets had, according to their autopsy reports. This made me suspicious of what the Russians had found."

  "But maybe your device on the bridge melted away," Emily speculated.

  Dr. Thiel gestured impatiently. "No, no, impossible. The clasp device was gold. If it had burned, the entire bridge would have melted. No, I feel certain that the male corpse that the Russians identified as Hitler was a double, with dentures redone to match Hitler's own, but my added device was missing. However, if the body that was cremated was that of a Hitler double, I was left with a question. If that was a fake Hitler, what had happened to the real Hitler?"

  "Is that why you suggested to my father that he dig in the garden of the Führerbunker again?"

  "I suggested that he should search one last time for two pieces of evidence—another jawbone with another dental bridge, the very one I fixed for Hitler, the real one. If you, Fräulein Ashcroft, found that, you would know that Hitler had died and been cremated as so many claim."

  "Dr. Thiel, that is only one thing to look for. You said there were two. What is the other?"

  Dr. Thiel was shuffling through his papers. He held up o
ne sheet. "See this?"

  Emily moved closer. It was a crude pen sketch that resembled some kind of cameo bearing a man's face. "What is that?" she asked.

  "The second piece of evidence you must search for if you are allowed to dig in the garden. It is a cameo that Hitler wore on a chain around his neck, on his chest actually. Probably no one but Eva, who slept with him, knew that he wore it. I happened to see it quite by accident. The last time I did dental surgery on Hitler, I put him under a general anesthetic. First, to make him more comfortable, I opened the top button of his shirt. There, against his body, on his chest, lay this cameo, obviously a good-luck piece."

  "What was it—whose face in the cameo?"

  "You know the oil painting that Hitler kept with him wherever he traveled for six years, the one that hung above his desk in the Führerbunker right up to the end, the one he gave to his private pilot Bauer to carry away to safety before the Russians came? This cameo was a reproduction of the face in his favorite oil."

  "The face of Frederick the Great."

  Dr. Thiel's long countenance offered a complimentary smile. "One and the same. We are told that Hitler died and was cremated while fully clothed. If so, he would still have been wearing this cameo beneath his tunic and shirt when he was buried. No one had time to look. Yet the Soviets never found it, probably never even knew about it. So if that was actually Hitler's body the Soviets found, the cameo would still be there lost in the rubble and dirt. If you dig, and can find either the cameo or the gold bridge I worked on, you will have found the real Adolf Hitler and be able to confirm that the Soviets were correct in assuming Hitler was cremated and buried in the garden. But in digging, you must dig more thoroughly than anyone before. If you come away empty handed, then it is very probable that Hitler did not die as the Soviets announced. You would have sound evidence that Hitler survived his supposed end and got away."