The generally accepted cause of Hitler's death on April 30, 1945 is suicide by gunshot and cyanide poisoning. The dual method and other circumstances surrounding the event encouraged rumors that Adolf Hitler may have survived the end of World War II along with speculation about what happened to his remains, however consensus on most of the details was eventually reached among historians, aided by the 1993 opening of records kept by the Russian KGB and FSB.
- For fiction about Hitler's death see Hitler in popular culture
Standard account of Hitler's death
Hitler relocated to the Führerbunker on January 16, 1945, where he presided over the rapid disintegration of his Third Reich before the Allies advancing from both east and west. By late April, Soviet forces were fighting within Berlin itself and Hitler began making preparations for his suicide. At 4:00 am on April 29, he finished his last will and testament.
Shortly after midnight on the morning of April 30, 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in a map room within the bunker complex. He then dictated his personal will and political testament to secretary Traudl Junge before retiring to bed at around 4:00 am.
That afternoon Hitler had a short meeting with Party Secretary Bormann before eating a small lunch. Hitler and Eva Braun then said their personal farewells to members of the Führerbunker staff and fellow occupants, including the Goebbels family, Bormann, the secretaries, and several military officers. At around 2:30 pm, Adolf and Eva Braun went into Hitler's personal study.
Some witnesses later reported hearing a loud gunshot at around 3:30 pm (the Goebbels' young son is said to have declared, "A direct hit!" thinking it was a bomb overhead). After waiting a few minutes, Hitler's valet, Heinz Linge, with Bormann at his side, opened the door to the study. Linge later stated he immediately noted a scent of burned almonds in the small study, a common observation made in the presence of prussic acid, a form of cyanide. The Hitlers were both sitting on a small sofa, Eva on the left, Adolf to the right. Eva's body slumped away from Adolf's. Hitler appeared to have shot himself in the right temple with a 7.65 mm pistol which lay at his feet. Blood was dripping from the wound to his right temple and had made a large stain on the left arm of the sofa. Eva had no visible physical wounds and Linge assumed she had poisoned herself.
Several witnesses stated the two bodies were carried to a small, bombed-out garden outside the bunker complex, where they were doused with petrol and set alight by Linge and members of Hitler's personal SS bodyguard. The SS guards and Linge later noted the fire did not completely destroy the corpses, but Soviet shelling of the bunker compound made further cremation attempts impossible and the remains were later covered up in a shallow bomb crater.
These badly burned and hastily buried remains were recovered by a SMERSH unit which had been assigned to locate Hitler's body (it was attached to the 79th Rifle Corps of the Soviet Third Shock Army and is frequently referred to as 79th SMERSH).
Autopsy
An autopsy was performed by this SMERSH unit, led by Chief Forensic Pathologist Dr. Faust Sherovsky. They first identified Hitler using odontological records of removable dental fittings given to Hitler by his dentist Hugo Blaschke. Two of Blaschke's arrested assistants (Fritz Echtmann and Kaethe Hausermann) confirmed the accuracy of the records by first drawing sketches of his bridgework from memory.
Sherovsky noted in his initial report that a piece of Hitler's skull cap was missing. The autopsy also led to the discovery of glass fragments in his mouth along with traces of cyanide in both bodies and the official cause of death published by the team was poisoning by cyanide with no mention of a gunshot wound. The findings were released by the USSR on May 16, 1945 and were quickly recognized as lacking by both Soviet and Western authorities.
Skull fragment
A skull fragment was later recovered from the Führerbunker and found to contain a single bullet hole, most likely from a 7.65mm round. The skull fragment was taken to Moscow in 1946 along with the jaw section used for the dental identification, eventually finding its way to the Moscow Archives. Decades later they were located in a basement of the Moscow Archives, and the skull was publicly displayed as part of an exhibition called The Agony of the Third Reich. DNA samples have been compared to those of known surviving Hitler relatives and the matching results indicate the fragment is most likely genuine.
Rumors of escape
Allied officials were deluged with a flurry of unsubstantiated reports that Hitler had escaped from Berlin and fled to Argentina, Spain or a moated castle in Westphalia. Although such rumors abated somewhat after the war, the lack of public confirmation of the existence of Hitler's remains caused rumors to circulate and re-appear for several decades, including various myths that he had fled to New Swabia in Antarctica (and even descended into a hollow earth). These rumors, often repeated on websites, usually conflated facts regarding the post-war activities of fugitive ex-Nazi officials (including the ODESSA organisation) with fictional storylines from the many popular books, films and television programs that have been produced on the topic but no evidence has ever emerged that either Hitler or Braun were alive after April 30, 1945.
Later Russian disclosures
A book by Soviet journalist Lev Bezymensky on the SMERSH autopsy report was published in the west in 1968 but was associated with other disinformation attempts and considered untrustworthy.
The KGB/FSB opened their files to the public in 1993, releasing records and statements by former KGB members. Drawing from these, historians reached a general consensus about what happened to the bodies of Hitler and Braun.
After the autopsy their remains were frequently buried and exhumed by SMERSH during the unit's relocation from Berlin to a new facility at 30-32 Klausnerstrasse in Magdeburg where they (along with the charred remains of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his wife Magda and their six children) were permanently buried in an unmarked grave beneath a paved section of the front courtyard and the ___location was kept highly secret.
By 1970 the SMERSH facility (now controlled by the KGB) was scheduled to be handed over to the East German government. Keen to destroy any possibility Hitler's burial site might become a Neo-Nazi shrine, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised a special operation to destroy the remains. On April 4, 1970 a Soviet KGB team (who had been given detailed burial charts) exhumed the bodies and thoroughly burned them before dumping the ashes in the Elbe river.
Pistol or cyanide?
Journalist James O'Donnell, after extensive interviews with inhabitants of the bunker (including those unavailable for years due to Soviet detention), noted a consensus that shortly before his death, Hitler spoke with another doctor, Werner Haase, who gave him instructions on how to make the suicide successful, which included recommending a combination of cyanide and a gunshot to the temple. However, Haase died in Soviet captivity and O'Donnell relied on witness accounts.
Moreover, O'Donnell learned that many of the witnesses who claimed to have heard a gunshot actually did not (the doors to the study were considered thick enough to muffle such a sound). Some witnesses told O'Donnell that during interrogations Allied officers encouraged them to confirm they heard a shot.
It's often asserted attempts have been made to portray a more "honorable soldier's death" for Hitler by way of single gunshot, as opposed to a "coward's suicide" by poison. O'Donnell noted that such claims are based on ideology, not fact, and remarked such claimants should learn how to "give the devil his due."
In 2005, Erna Flegel, who served as a nurse in the bunker, said Hitler was so paranoid he suspected spies had filled his cyanide capsules with something nontoxic and may explain why he killed his dog Blondie while testing a capsule. Moreover, the capsules had been obtained through Heinrich Himmler, who Hitler believed had betrayed him [1].
Flegel was also quoted that year as saying, "There were a few people who then heard it [the shot] and there were others who didn't. The Führer suddenly wasn't there any more. I knew that the Führer was dead. Suddenly there were more doctors in the bunker, including Professor Haase. I didn't see Hitler's body. It was taken up to the garden. The Führer had such an authority that when he was there you knew it. It felt so extraordinary."
Could he have done both?
Another point of speculation has been whether Hitler was physically capable of shooting himself while biting a glass ampule of cyanide at the same time, since rapid and violent convulsions are often evident during cyanide poisoning.
One theory suggests Hitler died after ingesting cyanide and his body was then shot by someone else to either make sure he was dead or make it appear the Führer had died a soldier's suicide by gunshot. Eva Braun is sometimes mentioned as the shooter. She had trained with a pistol during the preceding weeks (as did many German women in response to stories of widespread rape and murder by advancing Red Army soldiers) and was presumably one of the only people Hitler trusted at the end of his life. Other candidates would include Heinz Linge (Hitler's valet) and Martin Bormann, who were the first to enter the study. Most historians discount these possibilities.
O'Donnell also noted that Walter Hewel, like Hitler, was given instructions on the same dual suicide method (along with the same type of cyanide capsule). Hewel committed suicide on May 2 by a combination of the capsule and a gunshot wound to the head. O'Donnell cited Hewel's death as a cruel proof positive such a suicide was possible.
Based on witness reports of a loud gunshot and Linge's account of finding the bodies, Hitler shot himself in the right temple after Braun took cyanide. There is significant evidence that to ensure self-destruction, Hitler bit into a glass ampule of cyanide as he pulled the trigger of his personal Walther PPK pistol.
Trivia
- In July 1943 Pierre J. Huss, chief correspondent in Berlin for the International News Service who had interviewed Hitler several times during the 1930s and 1940s, filed a report which concluded, "But Hitler, unlike Il Duce, probably will ride the storm to the bitter end, wildly spilling oceans of blood in occupied countries and even in the Reich itself, and kill himself rather than follow Mussolini's example and resign." That same year a classified psychological report by the Office of Strategic Services came to the same conclusion.
- Hitler's last lunch has been said to have been spaghetti with a "light sauce." According to his secretaries (who ate with him), the conversation at the meal revolved around dog breeding and how lipstick was made from sewer grease. Both were topics which Hitler had brought up on numerous past occasions.
- There was an anecdote, likely an urban legend, that the fragment of Hitler's skull from the Archives was presented as a gift to Stalin, who then used it as an ashtray in a boast of triumph over his enemy. This story may have emerged from a more prosaic tale however, since the fragments were kept for a time in a wooden cigar box by a member of 79th SMERSH.
- On October 31, 2003, Kamato Hongo, the only living person with a birthdate earlier than Adolf Hitler, passed away. With the passing of Ramona Trinidad Iglesias-Jordan on May 29, 2004, no one born in the decade of the 1880s, male or female, was known to be living. In effect, if Hitler had still been alive somewhere, he would have been the oldest living person in the world.
Bibliography
- The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper 1947. University Of Chicago Press; Reprint (1992). ISBN 0226812243
- Inside Hitler's Bunker : The Last Days of the Third Reich by Joachim Fest, ISBN 0374135770
References
- O'Donnell, James - The Bunker. - New York: Da Capo Press; Reprint(2001). - ISBN 0306809583.
- Waite, Robert G.L. - The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. - New York: First DaCapo Press Edition, 1993 (orig. pub. 1977). - ISBN 0306805146.
- Ada Petrova - The Death of Hitler: The Full Story With New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives - W W Norton & Co Inc (May 1, 1995) - ISBN 0393039145