BERLIN, MAY 1945

A legendary monster or terrifying ghost, Hitler continues to haunt the imagination. After the fall of Berlin on 2 May 1945 two questions remained: Is he dead? Or has he escaped? According to the survivors of his bunker, he took his own life on 30 April 1945. Then he was burnt so that his corpse would not be found. It is precisely this absence of a body that would inevitably prompt a series of rumours to the effect that he might in fact have survived. On 8 May 1945 Leonid Leonov, an author hailed by the Soviet regime, published a passionate text in Pravda: “We demand material proof that this wily corporal has not turned into a werewolf. The little children of the world can sleep peacefully in their cradles. The Soviet armies, like their Western allies, want to see the Führer’s corpse ‘as large as life.’” The tone was set. While that ultimate “large as life” proof was still missing, Hitler’s ghost would linger in people’s minds. And an increasing number of people claimed to have seen him. Among the stories, some were based on tangible facts. One of them is like a spy film. It concerns the journey of the U-530–U for Unterseeboot, the German for submarine. In spite of the fall of the Third Reich, this vessel refused to surrender to the Allies and reached the coast of Argentina on 10 July 1945. Perhaps with secret passengers on board.

At the command post of the U-530 was a very young officer, perhaps too young. His name was Otto Wermuth, and he was only twenty-four. This undistinguished Oberleutnant zur See (the equivalent of a British Sub-Lieutenant or an American Lieutenant Junior Grade) was swiftly promoted on 10 January 1945 to commander of this fighting submarine. In this last year of the war, the Kriegsmarine (the German navy) was suffering, like the rest of the armies of the Reich, from an all-too-obvious shortage of battle-hardened officers. Of course, Otto Wermuth wasn’t a complete beginner, but he hadn’t had time to put himself to the test. He was recruited to the Kriegsmarine with the outbreak of the war against Poland, France, and the United Kingdom, in September 1939. He was nineteen years old at the time, and a long way from the battling figure of the Aryan warrior celebrated by the German regime. Otto Wermuth looked more like an elegant student, with his long face and equally slender, almost skinny, physique. He was quickly appointed to the “U-Boot” division of the Nazi army. Once he had completed his training, he was sent on a mission, in September 1941, as a watch officer.

By the time he found himself in charge of the U-530, an up-to-date submarine with a very long range, in January 1945, Wermuth had never been a commander. The vessel under his command was quite daunting. It was over seventy-six metres long, and could hold a crew of up to fifty-six. With its torpedo and mine launchers, as well as its deck gun, it was a formidable weapon. But the young commander would not really have time to put it to the test.

Sent on a mission off the American coast in April 1945, the U-530 fired nine torpedoes on Allied ships just south of Long Island, near Hudson Bay. These attacks were a complete failure. None of the bombs hit their targets. Wermuth learned of the German capitulation and received the order from his staff to surrender. He refused and decided to flee to Argentina. At the time, that country was a military dictatorship. Even though, under pressure from the United States, the Argentinian rulers had declared war on Germany on 27 March 1945, they continued to feel a certain admiration for the Nazi model. On 10 July 1945, after a two-month voyage, the U-530 arrived 400 kilometres south of Buenos Aires, at the city of Mar del Plata. Wermuth was taken prisoner along with his vessel and its crew. The news spread very quickly. And with it, the suspicion of the presence of Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun on board the submarine. As well as being drawn towards fascism, Argentina had a German community clustered together in Bavarian-style villages in Patagonia. Perfect ingredients for the scenario of Hitler taking refuge in South America.

As soon as he had disembarked, Wermuth was interrogated by both the Argentinian and US navies. The German officer was suspected of berthing in other small towns a few hours before his surrender on 10 July. Had he taken advantage of those stops to unload passengers or documents? On 14 July 1945, a memo was sent to Washington by the American naval attaché based in Buenos Aires. He reported the arrival of a submarine that had unloaded two unidentified passengers.

The Argentinian press also picked up the adventure of the U-530 and published article after article about Hitler still being alive. One of those reports, published in the magazine Critica on 18 July, claimed that the German dictator had found refuge at the South Pole, in an area where the temperature was bearable. The Argentinian Foreign Minister, César Ameghino, was obliged to intervene officially, to put a stop to these rumours. On the day of the publication of the article, he issued a formal denial. Hitler had not been set down on the Argentinian coast by a German submarine.

Still, the FBI investigated the South American trail. Not least because the American secret service had also received some surprising reports. In particular, one about Robert Dillon, a mediocre Hollywood actor. On 14 August 1945, he contacted the FBI to tell them he had met an Argentinian who had been involved in taking Hitler into his country. The story of the submarine again! Dillon went further in his details. The Führer had disembarked with two women, a doctor, and about fifty men. They had hidden in the hills of the Southern Andes. Hitler was suffering from asthma and ulcers. He had also shaved off his moustache. After being checked by the American special services, Dillon’s “scoop” melted away.

Over the years, reports of this kind piled up on the desks of the FBI. They concern Hitler, but also the presence of other Nazis in Brazil, Chile, Bolivia and, of course, Argentina. Not all of these rumours were wildly far-fetched. There really were systems of escape routes for Nazi criminals. One of the best-known of these was the Odessa network. Over the years, it would allow officials from the Third Reich to escape from Europe. It is also true that Argentina offered asylum to numerous Nazi torturers. Among the most notorious of these, Josef Mengele (a doctor in the Auschwitz concentration camp, guilty of barbarous medical experiments on the inmates there), Adolf Eichmann (an active organiser of the “Final Solution’), and Klaus Barbie (head of the Gestapo in the French city of Lyon). But not a trace of Adolf Hitler.

Ten years after the Nazi capitulation, in July 1955, the German legal system decided to close the file on Hitler once and for all. The court in Berchtesgaden, the little town in Bavaria with 7,000 inhabitants, was appointed to lead the investigation. A purely symbolic choice: the German dictator had liked to withdraw to the town for some peace and quiet. He had built his personal residence there, the Berghof. So it was this provincial court that would rule on the Führer’s legal status: dead or alive. The timing was no coincidence. It coincided with the return of Nazi prisoners held by the Soviets. These included key witnesses of the last hours in the Führerbunker, the air-raid shelter where the dictator ended his days. Close to Hitler, they had been captured by the Red Army and immediately imprisoned secretly in the Soviet Union. Their statements had never been made public or transmitted to the Western allies. And certainly not to the German courts. But in 1955 Moscow agreed to free the last Nazi war criminals who were still rotting away in its jails. A political gesture that would have a cost for West Germany; in exchange, the country committed itself to establishing diplomatic and economic relations with the USSR. As soon as they returned, the German courts interrogated these senior dignitaries of the Third Reich. Thanks to their testimonies, it was possible to conclude that Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, had taken their own lives on 30 April 1945. On 25 October 1956, Hitler and his wife were officially declared dead by the court in Berchtesgaden. From that moment, the death of the master of the Third Reich could be officially written down and published in history books around the world. The FBI also called off its investigations. For a decade, the American secret services had been carrying out investigations all over the world. With a certain relief Washington accepted the evidence of Hitler’s suicide in his bunker. But the essential factor was still missing: the body. At the time, there was still no physical proof of his death. Until the skull appeared.

Early 2000. The USSR had ceased to exist eight years previously, since its dissolution on 25 December 1991, to be precise. A new Russia tried to rebuild itself amid the ruins of a Communist regime that had been dying for years. Its status as a superpower had disappeared at the same time as the hammer and sickle on its flag. The liberal shock treatment applied by Boris Yeltsin turned the already precarious social and economic balance of the country into a train-ride to hell. In the eyes of the world, the red peril with its enormous nuclear arsenal had disappeared for good. The Russians felt humiliated. But in the year 2000, hope revived in the Kremlin. A new president had taken control of the reins. Admittedly he was young and a little bit shy, but he brought a welcome gravity and temperance to Russia after the Yeltsin years. His name was Vladimir Putin, and he was only forty-seven. This lieutenant colonel in the KGB had only one idea in mind: to restore his country’s glory, and put it back at the centre of the global political chessboard. By way of introduction, he reminded the world that Russia was a great military power. And that it was Russia that had won the war against Hitler.

On 27 April 2000, the eve of the fifty-fifth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany, Moscow opened a major exhibition of its secret archives. Its title left no doubt about the Russian President’s intentions: “Agony of the Third Reich–the Punishment.” This was unheard-of. In all, a hundred and thirty-five previously unpublished documents were revealed to the public; documents that the historians of the Second World War had dreamed of consulting for half a century. Soviet secret service reports classified as “top secret,” photographs, objects… everything that lifted the veil on the last minutes of Hitler in his bunker. The diary of Martin Bormann, the Führer’s secretary and confidant, was also on show: “Saturday 28 April: our Reich Chancellery is now nothing but a pile of ruins. The world is hanging on by a thread. […] Sunday 29: fire storm over Berlin. Hitler and Eva Braun got married.” Photographs of the Goebbels children, the correspondence of Nazi officials such as the architect of the regime and its arms minister, Albert Speer: “Hitler is decomposing before our eyes. He has turned into a bundle of nerves and completely ceased to control himself.” But the key exhibit was elsewhere, in a special room. An article from Le Monde describes the scene: “In the middle of a room hung with red velvet, a charred fragment of skull, punctured by a bullet-hole, has pride of place in a glass case.”^*

The exhibition was an international success. The Western media flocked to see it. The Russian authorities had won their bet. Or almost. Doubts concerning the authenticity of the skull arose very quickly. The organisers were embarrassed by the questions of the press. These included the director of the State Archives, the famous Sergei Mironenko–the same Mironenko whose shadow we have spotted in the long corridors of GARF. In 2000, he wasn’t yet hugging the walls, and still held his head high. He reigned over the Russian archives like a tsar. Journalists and historians wooed him with glasses of increasingly strong vodka in a bid to get into his good graces. And more importantly, to get closer to that bit of skull exhumed from the secret store-rooms. In the full glare of publicity, Western doubts put proud Mironenko in a delicate situation. How could he assert that this human fragment was really a part of Hitler? The director of the archives heard these remarks constantly. While he replied that there was no doubt about its authenticity, he felt that it wasn’t enough. Even Alexei Litvin, one of the curators of the exhibition in 2000, had to acknowledge: “It’s true that we haven’t subjected it to a DNA analysis, but all statements conclude that this is Hitler.”^† Statements? Not indisputable scientific analyses? It was at that moment that Mironenko became aware of the risk of losing control of the situation and seeing a revival of the controversy over Hitler’s death.

Rather than taking a step back, he went into action and dared to go a step further. A new forensic analysis? Carried out by foreign scientists? No problem! The director of the archives was quite proud of himself. Except that he couldn’t close the Pandora’s box that he had just opened.

Of course the Russian authorities wouldn’t grant authorisation for those analyses. However, Mironenko’s offer got people’s hopes up and, with or without authorisation, became one of the last mysteries of the Second World War.

Larisa Rogovaya had been Mironenko’s deputy. Today, the new director of GARF is using the same methods as her illustrious predecessor. Never confronting journalists head on. Around the big rectangular table there are four of us, standing up, looking at the skull. Lana, the two archivists Dina and Nikolai, and me, my eyes fixed on this brownish bone. Apart from Larisa, who is still sitting in her black leather armchair. She seems to be amused at the sight of us, impressed and keen to take things further. She expected that we would want to subject it to forensic analysis. Like Mironenko sixteen years earlier, she too confirms that analyses of the skull are entirely feasible. She even adds that she has dreamed of such analyses. “It would be a lovely opportunity for us,” she claims, giving us her first smile since we arrived. “Yes, that would be perfect. We will support you in this project, you can count on us.” Dina and Nikolai cry in chorus. “That would give us a chance to establish the truth. And to put an end to this disastrous controversy. The one sparked a few years ago by that so-called American researcher.”

Larisa grimaces suddenly as she struggles to conceal her profound revulsion. Her two colleagues freeze as if someone has poured a bucket of icy water over their heads. They try very hard to put on a bold front. Why this unease? Is the director of GARF alluding to the work carried out by a team of American investigators in 2009? The case caused a considerable stir at the time. Nick Bellantoni, an archaeology professor at Connecticut University, claimed to have taken a sample of the skull. That bone sample had then been analysed in his university’s genetics laboratory. And the result was broadcast in a television documentary on the History Channel. “The bone seemed to be very thin,” the American archaeologist says. “Male bone tends to be more robust, and the sutures where the skull plates come together seem to correspond to someone under forty.” Bellantoni was undermining the story put forward by the Russian authorities. Basing his analysis on a DNA test, he also claimed that the skull preserved in Moscow was that of a woman. Nothing to do with Hitler. Doubts resurfaced. The theories of the Führer’s plot and escape gained currency with the American revelations.

Bellantoni’s scoop was immediately repeated in the world’s press. The information was summed up as follows: for years, the Russians have been lying! For Moscow, the insult was both painful and humiliating. Even today it’s a bitter pill to swallow. All the more so in that the director of GARF claims never to have seen that American archaeologist within her walls. Or have authorised the taking of a sample.

Dina picks up the visitors’ log that Lana has filled in. There are several names in the columns above our own. Only a very few visitors have had the privilege of seeing the skull. No more than ten in over twenty years. “All the teams of journalists and researchers who have seen this skull have signed this document. Look, that American’s name doesn’t appear there. He never came here.” Curiously, his visit to GARF has never been recorded in the registers. Unlike our visit. Nick Bellantoni doesn’t deny this administrative oddity. When we asked him the question by email, he replied simply that “all procedures for my work in the Russian archives were managed by the producers of the History Channel. So it is no surprise that my name does not appear on this list. It must have been recorded under the name of the History Channel or the producers.” An argument refuted by the director of the Archives. To be clear, she wrote us an official letter: “I wish to inform you that GARF did not sign any agreements with any television channel, Mr. Bellantoni or anyone else to carry out a DNA examination based on the fragment of Hitler’s skull.”

Might the American archaeologist have acted without permission? The Russian media were categorical. The case became a national scandal. The scholar from Connecticut found himself at the heart of an almost ideological controversy: West vs East, the capitalist bloc against the former Communist bloc. On the Russian national television channel NTV (close to Russian power), in 2010, a whole programme was devoted to Bellantoni’s “scoop.” In the presence of Russian Second World War historians and other popular personalities old enough to remember the war, the American tried to reassure everyone. Above all, he was keen not to come across as a looter of archives. First, he assured everyone that his work had been completely legal. “We received official authorisation from the Russian Archives, with whom we signed a contract to carry out our work.” A claim refuted by GARF, as we have already seen.

But let us return to the thread of the interview with Nick Bellantoni on NTV. The presenter quizzes him about the analyses that he has carried out on the skull:

Bellantoni: “No. We didn’t do that! […] You know, there are a lot of difficulties involved in working on burnt remains. For geneticists, exploring this subject is a real nightmare. It’s extremely difficult to extract markers from this matter that capture the sex of the subject. But we can conclude that the skull in your collection belonged to a woman. Perhaps it was Eva Braun, but we can’t be sure.”

On the stage of the programme, among the guests, an elderly lady comes forward. Her name is Rimma Markova. This actress, famous for acting in Soviet films, embodies the nostalgia for the Stalinist regimes. Even though she is eighty-five, she is still furious: “How did he manage to take those samples? He is telling the world that he’s a thief! He needs to go to prison for what he did.”

Bellantoni: “I’m just a scientist who was invited to examine this skull.”

Rimma Markova: “Tell us who gave you those samples. The Archive staff or the representatives of your television channel?”

It’s always the same line of questioning. Bellantoni is cornered. Is he going to crack on live TV?

Bellantoni: “We’ve been authorised to examine and take samples. It’s part of the contract. I must stress once again that I’m working on this project as a scientist. If you want more details, ask the people in charge of the channel.”

Seven years have passed since then. We also asked Nick Bellantoni to explain to us how he had managed to get hold of those fragments of skull. He replied very promptly: “Our team was authorised to take some small pieces of burnt bone that had become detached from the skull. We didn’t damage or take samples from the skull itself […] I didn’t take those pieces to the United States. They were sent to us by the producers when we came back to the university to carry out the analyses. I imagine that these pieces were given to us by officials. You can check that with the History Channel.”

And that’s what we did.

Joanna Forscher produced Nick Bellantoni’s documentary on Hitler’s skull. Her reply to our questions has the merit of concision: “I have often been asked that question, and unfortunately I cannot reveal any details about how we had this access to the skull.” And she concludes with a mysterious remark: “The circumstances of our access can no longer be reproduced in any way.”

Seven years after the visit by Bellantoni and the History Channel team, the mystery remains unsolved. And GARF is still deeply traumatised.

Larisa grits her teeth. Her fury isn’t directed at us. She narrows her eyes at Dina and Nikolai. Has some corruption taken place? Has money been passed to an archivist to leave the American researcher alone with “Stalin’s trophy” for a few moments. “We don’t know what happened,” the director says, rising to her feet. “We know that this was all illegal, and we deny the results of these analyses.”

Our meeting is about to be cut short. We have to find a way of extending it, to give us time to convince the director of our good intentions. We too want to do tests on the skull. Who can grant us that authorisation? Lana asks the essential question, the only one worth asking, just as Larisa is leaving the room. No answer. Undaunted, she follows the director into the corridor, refusing to let go. They are now in the secretaries’ office–only a few more metres and Larisa will have reached her office. Russian protocol will prevent us from going in uninvited. “What must we do?” Lana asks as politely as possible. “Is it just you? The President’s office…?” Appalled, Larisa turns round. “Certainly not me,” she begins. Then continues, “Sort it out with the Bureau of Investigation! This is nothing more or less than a criminal investigation, into a corpse, part of a corpse. It is the Department of Justice that can reopen this inquiry.” The grey of the walls around us has never seemed as depressing to me as it does now. The trap is closing in. Russian bureaucracy, that hideous child born of seventy years of Soviet control, is waiting to crush us. “I know, it can take months, but I’m going to support your request.” Larisa senses how overwhelmed we are. She seems almost sorry. “Don’t worry,” she says to us at last. “Spasiba, spasiba,” Lana thanks her, and gestures to me to do the same. Once again the director’s face relaxes. “So who would come to carry out these analyses? Find someone scientifically irreproachable, and not an American. Anyone but an American.”

* Le Monde, 2 May 2000, Agathe Duparc.

† Libération, 2 May 2000, Hélène Despic-Popovic.