Hitler’s End

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.

Three years after the end of World War II and almost fifty years after William Hughes Mearns wrote those lines, a man who wasn’t there was offered a chair. In 1948 officials in Munich arranged for Adolf Hitler to face a denazification tribunal. The judges considered the empty chair’s responsibility for the murder of millions, declared its nonoccupant a “major offender,” and confiscated part of his property.

“I wish, I wish he’d go away,” continues the rhyme. But he wouldn’t. Since no death certificate had been issued for the Führer, his sister Paula could not receive items he had bequeathed her in his personal will. Beginning in 1953 a court in Berchtesgaden labored through bundles of testimony, and finally, on December 3, 1956, a death certificate issued by the exhausted magistrate became legally valid. “Eleven and a half years after the Second World War, the ‘mystery’ of Adolf Hitler’s fate appeared resolved,” writes Caroline Sharples in The Long Death of Adolf Hitler. But incredibly, it wasn’t. There was plenty more to the story.

What does it mean to be officially dead? This is what Sharples considers in her cleverly researched and sometimes unnerving book. She records the facts, uncertainties, deceptions, and on occasion shameless fictions that have attended efforts to resolve the question of how Hitler died and what happened to his remains. Sharples’s account of successive versions is roughly chronological. But it’s helpful to first set out a summary of what we think we know today. On April 29, 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun in his Berlin bunker. They then committed suicide: he shot himself in the head, and she took cyanide. Their bodies were carried upstairs to the Reich Chancellery garden, doused with gasoline, and set alight. Soviet forces found the remains a few days later and took them away for autopsy. Hitler’s jaw and teeth were removed and kept in Moscow. The other remains were dumped in a river near Magdeburg in 1970 by a KGB unit. Almost all these details have been challenged or are at least not irrevocably confirmed.

As Sharples suggests, the best proof of death is a corpse—an identifiable body—and failing that, a body part, but on two conditions. First, it must be scientifically shown to have belonged to the presumed subject. Second—and this became relevant in the Hitler case—its removal from the body must have either caused death or been performed after death. Hitler’s ear would not have proved much. But his jawbone, complete with elaborate fillings and crowns matching his dental records, would be conclusive. And that Führer fragment, severed from the corpse dug up and forensically examined by SMERSH (Soviet military counterintelligence), was in Russian hands. Unfortunately for British and American researchers, the Russians refused even to admit that they had found a body. The jawbone, stored in an old cigar tin lined with red satin, was consigned to a secret Moscow archive.

As Soviet troops approached the bunker, the world’s first question was: Where is Hitler? His death had been announced, without details, by his chosen successor, Admiral Karl Dönitz. But was it true? It became apparent that the British and Americans were much more worried about the possibility that Hitler might have escaped than the Soviets were. In Berlin, Soviet intelligence officers at first gossiped to their Allied counterparts that they had found Hitler’s remains, only to go silent when they heard that Stalin had just told Roosevelt’s adviser Harry Hopkins and US ambassador Averell Harriman that no body had been found and that Hitler was probably at large somewhere in Germany.

The Western Allies were convinced that a Nazi revival was still possible and that the Führer might emerge from hiding to lead it. This worry was groundless, but it contrasted with the relaxed attitude of the Soviet authorities. No wonder—they had found the corpses of Hitler and Braun almost at once, fire-damaged but recognizable, in a shell crater grave. Witnesses to the cremation among the bunker staff had been arrested and locked up in Russia. As the cold war took shape, Moscow encouraged rumors that the British were hiding Hitler in a castle in their occupation zone or that the “imperialists” had helped him reach Latin America.

The Russians secretly held the direct physical evidence of Hitler’s death. The West, by contrast, soon possessed the bulk of indirect evidence in the form of witness statements. The British insisted that this uncertainty was intolerable and dangerous, and they asked the young historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to prepare a report.

On November 1, 1945, Sharples writes, the “bespectacled, thirty-one-year-old Oxford don stood before the assembled Allied press corps” and outlined the results of his inquiry. Hitler was dead, Trevor-Roper confirmed, having committed suicide by gunshot, and his body had been immediately incinerated in the Chancellery garden. He added more details in the next few months, but his 1945 report, later expanded into the best-selling book The Last Days of Hitler (1947), became the accepted account of Hitler’s end for many years. Its weaknesses, such as they were, became clear only slowly. Trevor-Roper did not know, of course, that the Soviet authorities had disinterred Hitler’s body and stored what was left of him. He broadly accepted the varying recollections of bunker survivors that the bodies of Hitler and Braun had been burned to unrecognizable remnants and ashes. It was not until 1956 that a former SS bunker guard, Harry Mengershausen, stated that the flames had left Hitler’s corpse recognizable and confirmed growing suspicions that the Soviet authorities had found and removed his remains. Trevor-Roper acknowledged that this was probably true.

The first witness statements were unreliable. Some of the SS staff who had watched the cremation disagreed about whether Hitler’s face had been uncovered or recognizable when he was laid on the pyre but conceded that some body parts and clothing were still visible after the flames had died down. These were not voluntary witnesses but Allied prisoners half expecting to be shot out of hand, so they may simply have been distancing themselves from any helpful knowledge. Bunker staff under interrogation at first said that Hitler had shot himself while Braun took poison. (A shot was heard, but no one else was in the room when the pair killed themselves.) Over time some of them began to change their stories: one or two asserted that Hitler, too, had swallowed cyanide. There was nothing to confirm this except rumors that glass splinters from a poison phial had been found in his mouth. But there was a motive. The Russians and their collaborators were determined to show the world that Hitler had died “a coward’s death” by poison instead of choosing a soldier’s final act of defiance.

In November 1945 a man detained by the British for giving a false identity had an extra stroke of bad luck. A corporal searching him had worked for the menswear brand Aquascutum in London before the war, and something about the prisoner’s bulky coat seemed wrong to him. He ripped it open and found a sheaf of papers. Among them was the original signed copy of Hitler’s will. There was a private will and a rabid political testament, which included these crucial words: “I have decided…to remain in Berlin and there of my own free will to choose death at the moment when I believe the position of the Führer and Chancellor itself can no longer be held.” Sharples recounts Trevor-Roper’s wild adventures as he drove about western Germany hunting down the remaining two copies of the will. But the Western occupation powers now had confirmation of his earlier research: “It was the first physical, albeit non-biological, proof of death they had been looking for.”

In 1954 Hitler’s dental technician, Fritz Echtmann, was released from Soviet captivity and told a startled West German court that he had handled the Führer’s lower jaw. Soviet intelligence had shown him the relic (still in a cigar tin) and asked him to identify the complex bridgework. Echtmann’s testimony confirmed data held by the Americans, who had captured Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s personal dentist, in 1945 and persuaded him to write down a minute description of all the fillings, crowns, and cavities he could remember. Nine years later Echtmann corroborated Blaschke’s memory.

Two things were now obvious. First, physical proof of Hitler’s death did exist. This mattered especially to the British, who worried about persistent gossip that it was his double who had died in Berlin, leaving the actual Führer to escape and plot his comeback. Unfortunately Sharples doesn’t examine the “doubles” mythology of the 1930s and 1940s. Every major leader from Churchill to the emperor of Japan was assumed to have a perfect impersonator who might take an assassin’s bullet or die in an air raid. Some certainly did use doubles on occasion. As a wartime child, I remember how every visiting statesman, friend or foe, was inspected by journalists to see if he was “real.”

The second conclusion from the disclosure of the Führer’s mandible was that the Soviet authorities had been sitting on that vital information for the previous nine years. It soon became known that there was quite a little museum in Moscow with the blood-spattered sofa covering and a number of enigmatic skull fragments apparently found in the shell crater grave during a later excavation. At that time the technique of using DNA to identify an individual’s remains was decades away, and ungloved handling of the Moscow relics had by then contaminated them so thoroughly that nothing significant could be learned from them.

Then, in 1956, the Soviets finally released the last German prisoners of war, who had survived up to twelve years in the gulag. Among these gaunt Heimkehrer were members of the bunker staff, including Mengershausen. Three of them were the only men still alive who had gone into Hitler’s study after the gunshot. They had seen the bodies and the bloodstained sofa on which he lay, and they described blood flowing from a wound in his temple. Five of them had helped to carry the two blanket-covered corpses upstairs and set them alight. There were minor contradictions in their stories about whether anyone had actually seen Hitler’s face at this point and how much gasoline was used.

In 1968 there were new revelations, accompanied by clouds of unreliable propaganda, with the publication of the Soviet journalist Lev Bezymenski’s The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives. To the outrage of Western scholars, he repeated the claim that Hitler had taken poison and suggested that they had been part of an anti-Soviet plot to fake evidence of a gunshot. But the book also contained the first admission by the Soviets that they had found and removed Hitler’s charred body on May 5, 1945, and—sensationally—it included in gruesome detail the full autopsy reports on all the bodies found near the bunker. As Bezymenski gleefully recorded, the postmortem confirmed a rude soldiers’ song from the war: Hitler really had “only got one ball.”

I knew Bezymenski—tiny, exuberant, merrily unreliable—when we worked as foreign correspondents in Bonn. He had been in Soviet intelligence during the war, and apart from all the nonsense he made up to annoy West German officials, he still had a direct line to the highest levels in Moscow. They could use him to break genuine news before the established Soviet media did. The publication of the autopsies finally marked the end of the “long death” of Adolf Hitler as a serious mystery: Soviet silence had been broken, and the corpse’s authenticity had been established. And yet the saga of the bunker’s last days and the missing dictator is still simply too good a story for the media to drop.

There was also the matter of the skull. At the moment of victory in 1945, SMERSH and the NKVD security police (later the KGB, today the FSB) were in vicious rivalry. A year after SMERSH found the bodies, NKVD agents went to the site and found cranial fragments, one of which had a small hole the size of a bullet exit wound. But SMERSH refused to give its rival access to Hitler’s corpse, so to this day no one can prove that the skull pieces were Hitler’s. Today, Sharples writes, they “rest in the archives of…the Russian Federation…and the teeth are held by the FSB. Access to each location is restricted and subject to political and bureaucratic whims.” Two French scientists were briefly allowed to study the teeth. They detached minute particles of plaque, which revealed nothing that wasn’t already known: Hitler had been a vegetarian, and his jaw had been discolored by a fire.

Hitler’s last command, the final Führerbefehl, had been that his body should be completely destroyed, leaving nothing for a conqueror to gloat over. His order was bungled, leaving behind an undignified but identifiable scatter of debris. Sharples gives a fascinating account of Nazi state funerals: monumental, neopagan, and ugly. Hitler liked ordering them for Nazi “martyrs” such as Reinhard Heydrich. But his own peculiar narcissism, veering between a Napoleonic self-image and an affected “little man” simplicity, suggests that he would have chosen an “ordinary German soldier’s burial”—attended by a few million mourners. The muddy mess in the Chancellery garden, followed by decades of goggling speculation about which tooth fit where, was beyond his nightmares.

According to legend, the twelfth-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa is asleep under a mountain, awaiting the call to rise and save his nation. There is no such legend about Hitler. After the war, the sociologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich observed that the Germans had lost the capacity to mourn—not just the Führer but also his victims. Sharples is right to say that the endless squabbles over his remains deprived postwar generations of a sense of closure. Those squabbles will persist as long as there are ambitious journalists and restricted archives. We will never know just what was said or done in those few minutes after Hitler and Braun closed the study door behind them and faced each other for the last time. But not long afterward Russian soldiers in the street began to shout, “Gitler kaput!”—“Hitler’s dead!”—and they were right.