MOSCOW, DECEMBER 2016

It’s impossible to ignore the proximity of Red Square. Christmas garlands and decorations frame a forest of little rectangular chalets singing the praises of Russian popular art. In an uninterrupted torrent, Muscovites in gaudy anoraks slalom among the stalls. Laughing, they hurry down the long pedestrian Nikolskaya Street towards the crimson walls of the Kremlin. The ones most vulnerable to the cold, or the least well covered-up, find an oasis of warmth by passing through one of the grand entrances to Gum, Moscow’s historic commercial centre. You can’t miss this great stone and glass ocean liner of a building opposite Lenin’s mausoleum. The temple to bourgeois hyper-consumption stands in contrast with the grim, dark marble sarcophagus of the master of the Russian Revolution. As if to taunt old Vladimir Ilyich, Gum has even been decked out with a thousand bright lights for the New Year celebrations, and its ostentatious window displays burst with Western luxury goods. A few foreign tourists, happy to test the heat-protecting properties of their fur hats, brave the polar wind. As if amazed by their own resistance to the cold, they take selfie after selfie with their mobile phones on the end of fragile telescopic perches. It’ll soon be Christmas.

Our present is waiting for us at the other end of the tourist quarter.

Here I am back on Russian territory. After a phone call from Lana the previous week, I made my mind up. “It’s okay, she told me, I’ve been given the green light and I’m taking the first flight from Paris to Moscow.” So here we are, Lana and I, bang in the middle, near the Kremlin.

We still don’t know the nature of the present as we pass through the crowds coming in the opposite direction along Nikoskaya Street.

The darkness of the Russian winter days makes the biting cold feel even more intense, even though, at only minus 15 degrees, the temperature is acceptable to a Muscovite. The appearance of cars with blue lights marks the end of the pedestrian section of the street. In front of us is a monumental square of the kind that the Russians are so good at building. At its centre, a snow-covered central island. Then, further off, a building with Italian-inspired orange pastel tones. The rigour of its architecture, stripped of decorative flourishes, gives it an immediately recognisable commanding quality. Lubyanka Square, with the notorious Lubyanka building bounding one side.

Lubyanka equals KGB, KGB equals terror. If the history of the Soviet Union has its shadowy areas, the Lubyanka is definitely its black sun. For decades, Number 2 Bolshaya Lubyanka housed the secret services of the Communist regime, the KGB. Not only its administrative service, which, with a simple stamp, dispatched deportees to the Siberian camps. No, hidden deep within this Lubyanka address are the interrogation rooms and a prison. For generations of Soviets, entering this building amounted to a death sentence, or at least the certainty of disappearing for many years. Some of the most important Nazis, imprisoned after the fall of the Reich, endured their worst torture sessions between these thick walls. Since 11 October 1991, the KGB has ceased to exist, having been partially replaced in 1995 by the FSB which is still based at 2 Bolshaya Lubyanka. That was where we were due to have our meeting. A meeting to try and consult the secret reports into Hitler’s death, the ones that haven’t yet been declassified. Particularly the ones about the discovery of the alleged body of the Führer. More than seventy years after the demise of the Third Reich, the Hitler file is still partly confidential, and comes within the competence of the secret services.

Quite quickly, thanks to our contacts at GARF, the Russian State Archives, we came to learn that one of the keys to the Hitler mystery dwelt at the heart of the FSB. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle scattered by a temperamental child, the pieces of the “H file” have been distributed among different Russian government services. Was it done deliberately so as not to leave such a secret in the hands of a single administration? Or was it just the result of a hidden war between bureaucrats jealous of their archive dossiers? The USSR, and then today’s Russia, have been skilled at creating and maintaining these administrative quarrels, the perfect illustration of a paranoid system. Whatever the truth of the matter, consulting these documents is like a treasure hunt whose rules vary between one contact and another. Stalin would not repudiate such methods. GARF gets the bit of skull that they claim belonged to Hitler, the Russian State Military Archives get the police files of the witnesses of the Führer’s last days, and the TsA FSB have the file about the discovery and authentication of the body. A chaotic spread of resources for anyone hoping for any kind of simplicity in the consultation of documents. People such as historians and journalists. The proliferation of pitfalls and authorities to be persuaded means that the slightest inquiry into the disappearance of the German dictator quickly becomes both infernal and exhausting, in terms of time and money.

It is now three months since we first made our application to the FSB. That was last October. Three months of waiting. Silence. Nothing. And then an answer. “No. Don’t even think about it. Impossible.” Lana knows the Russian mentality well enough not to give up at the first refusal. So she started writing new mails, and then going directly to the offices in question. Persuading people is her major gift. To increase our chances, she approached the media service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Alexander Orlov is the man who deals with journalists covering stories on Russian territory. He was the one who got me my temporary Russian press card, without which I wouldn’t be able to conduct this investigation. Alexander speaks French and knows about our research into Hitler. He’s bound to have contacts with the FSB. Lana is sure of it and she gets in touch with him. The result is a long time coming, but then there’s a call from Alexander. “Yes. Next week. Wednesday!”

The day before the meeting, when I’ve just booked in at my Moscow hotel, Lana tells me that it’s not going to happen on Wednesday now. It’s all been cancelled. In fact not cancelled, but postponed. Postponed to when? Maybe Thursday. On the phone, Lana negotiates and argues. “He’s come specially from Paris,” she explains to Alexander. “When is the French journalist going home?” he asks. “Ah, Friday! What time flight? 1:30 pm! Then the meeting will be on Friday at 10:00. The person who will see you is called Dmitri. Be on time!”

Apart from the surprise, even the joy, of a positive response, one question eats away at us: why? Why this sudden U-turn by the Russian authorities? Why would the FSB hand over secrets that had been so closely guarded for over seventy years? Why us? Let’s be frank. Lana and I very quickly came to doubt our importance for them. Not because we doubted the seriousness of our project, or the solid foundations of our professional reputation, but that couldn’t be enough.

There had, of course, been Lana’s patient, dogged work on the different bureaucratic wheels of the Russian administration. Not to mention the support, time and again, of her well-placed friends in the spheres of “Putinian” power. That combination seemed perfect when it came to removing obstacles in the way of our researches in the State Archives (GARF). It allowed us to obtain green lights from the relevant services relatively easily. And, above all, the definite permission to consult documents that few researchers, particularly foreign ones, could have got hold of. But the FSB archives are from another world, a closed world. All the more so since Putin took over the country. In the Yeltsin era, in the 1990s, you could get hold of anything if you poured money into it; today that’s impossible. Besides, everyone we met in the course of this investigation told us over and over again: the Hitler file is a Kremlin matter. No decision can be taken without agreement from the top levels of the state, or at least without their knowledge.

The most credible hypothesis we were able to come up with did not work in our favour. It could be summed up in a word: manipulation. What if granting us access to the files on Hitler’s death was useful to Russian state propaganda? Just like in Stalin’s day, immediately after the war, Moscow is suspicious of the West, of Europe, and primarily of the United States. Diplomatic tensions have been mounting between the White House and the Kremlin for a decade, and you don’t have to be a genius to sense the cooling of relations between the Western powers and Russia. And yet our investigation into Hitler is taking place within that tense context. It gives Moscow the opportunity to remind the whole world that it was the Red Army that defeated the Nazis and broke Hitler. The proof being the ultimate trophy of the Second World War: the remains of the Führer’s corpse, in fact a piece of his skull. Producing this evidence today is a reminder that Russia is a great nation, a power that can once again be counted on.

And who better to convey that message than a team of international journalists: Lana is Russian-American, I’m French.

That’s our hypothesis. For want of certainty, it encourages us to remain vigilant.

You might think that the wounds of the Second World War are finally healing as the last actors in that drama succumb to sickness or old age. The last days of the Führerbunker and its inhabitants have been known about for decades. There is no shortage of eyewitness testimonies or reference works. We know who among the inhabitants of Hitler’s shelter was arrested by the Soviets, the British, or indeed the Americans. We know who died, too. The visual proof exists for all of them–except Hitler and Eva Braun.

To prepare for our meeting with the FSB, Lana and I returned to the indisputable facts of the fall of Berlin.

On 2 May 1945, the first Soviet troops attacked the Führerbunker. In Hitler’s apartments, they found some injured people who were too exhausted to flee, and three corpses. These were Generals Krebs and Burgdorf, as well as the head of Hitler’s bodyguards, Franz Schädle. All three had chosen to commit suicide. No trace of Hitler. The previous day, as we saw earlier, an official message signed by Goebbels and Bormann and conveyed to the general staff of the Red Army announced the death of the Führer. Immediately informed, Stalin issued the express order to find his enemy’s body. All the secret services of the Soviet Union and the elite military units were informed of their new mission.

That was how, a few hours after the taking of the Führerbunker, the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels were found, photographed, and filmed. Those were the facts.

Let’s come back to the Goebbels case for a moment. There is no mystery about him. His suicide is confirmed by the existence of numerous documents, and especially photographs and videos. The fanatical master of Nazi propaganda took his own life and dragged his wife and six children with him into his final act of madness. It was 1 May 1945. Having received the order from Goebbels in person, the last SS men in the bunker burnt his corpse and that of Magda, his wife. Then they ran for it in the hope of escaping the Red Army. In their haste, they forgot, or didn’t take the time, to deal with the bodies of the children. Contrary to the plan, they would not be burnt.

The Soviets found the bodies of the Goebbels couple as soon as they entered the shelter. This is the account given in a “Top Secret” NK report by the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat (equivalent to a ministry) for Internal Affairs. It is dated 27 May 1945. It was sent directly to one of the most powerful and feared men in the USSE, the head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria.

On 2 May 1945 in Berlin, a few metres away from the air-raid shelter in the grounds of the Reich Chancellery, which has recently held Hitler’s headquarters, the charred corpses of a man and a woman were found; it is also noted that the man is of small stature, his right foot is in a semi-folded position in a charred orthopaedic shoe, and on his body were found the remains of the NSDAP party uniform and a party badge damaged by fire.

By the head of the two corpses lay two Walter No. 1 pistols.

The Goebbels children were not found until later. The officer who signed this report, Lieutenant General Aleksandr Vadis, was hard-bitten, a man inured to the horrors of the war of extermination that the Nazis waged against his country. Vadis wasn’t just anyone, in Berlin he led a very secret and very violent unit of SMERSH, the Soviet military counter-espionage service that operated between April 1943 and May 1946. And yet in his report he has difficulty concealing his dismay:

On the 3rd of May of this year, in a separate room in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery, 6 corpses of children were found laid out on beds–five girls and one boy wearing light nightshirts and bearing signs of poisoning.

[…]

The fact that the corpses of the man, the woman and the six children are in fact those of the Reich Propaganda Minister Dr. Goebbels, his wife and his children, is confirmed by the testimony of several prisoners. It should be noted that the most characteristic and convincing statement is that of the dentist of the Reich Chancellery “Sturmbannführer SS” Helmut Kunz, who has been directly implicated in the murder of the Goebbels children.

Interrogated on this matter, Kunz declared that as early as 27 April Goebbels’ wife asked him to help her kill her children, adding: “The situation is difficult, and plainly we will have to die.” Kunz gave his consent to this act.

On 1 May 1945 at midday, Kunz was summoned to the infirmary of Goebbels’ bunker, in the grounds of the Reich Chancellery, and once again it was Goebbels’ wife, then Goebbels himself, who proposed killing the children, declaring: “The decision has already been taken, because the Führer is dead and we must die. There is no other way out.”

After which Goebbels’ wife handed Kunz a syringe filled with morphine, and he gave each of the children an injection of 0.5 ml of morphine.—Ten to fifteen minutes later, when the children were half asleep, Goebbels’ wife introduced a crushed capsule containing cyanide into the mouth of each of them.

In this way all six of Goebbels’ children, from the age of four to fourteen [in fact Helga, the eldest, was only twelve] were killed.

After the murder of the children, Goebbels’ wife, accompanied by Kunz, went into Goebbels’ study and informed him that it was all over with the children, after which Goebbels thanked Kunz for his help in the murder of the children and dismissed him.

According to Kunz’s testimony, after the murder of the children, Goebbels and his wife also went to commit suicide.

The Russians agreed to pass on this confidential information to the Anglo-American Allies. Goebbels was a considerable trophy for the Kremlin. A trophy that was worth displaying to the whole world. Because there had not been enough petrol and time to take the cremation to its conclusion, Joseph and Magda Goebbels were easily identifiable. The Red Army hurried to broadcast photographs and films of their spoils. The bodies of the children were taken from the room where they had lain and placed in the gardens of the Chancellery near the remains of their parents. The two bodies, blackened by the flames, monstrous piles of flesh, lay next to frail children wearing white pyjamas. They looked as if they had just fallen asleep. The morbid display was horribly effective. The Soviets wanted to appeal to the emotions. Their message to the world was clear: look what the Nazi leaders are capable of! Look at this monstrous regime that we have defeated!

Photographs, films, everything was in place for the accreditation of Goebbels’ death. Certainly, the German Propaganda Minister embodied a large part of the totalitarian insanity of the Nazi regime, and his corpse symbolised the fall of Nazism. Certainly, for a few hours he had been the Chancellor of the Third Reich after the death of Hitler. So why did the Soviets not broadcast similar pictures and publicly exhibit corresponding documents for the keystone of the Nazi regime: the Führer? Even today there is no official visual proof of the charred body of Hitler or his wife.

Are we to believe that the Red Army didn’t take the time to photograph or film the remains of their greatest enemy? If not for the press then at least for Stalin? All the more so since, after the fall of Berlin on 2 May 1945, at the slightest suspicion of the discovery of Hitler’s body, films were shot and photographs taken. In some of these one can see Soviet soldiers proudly presenting a dead man with a small moustache, bearing a vague resemblance to the German dictator. The Russian chiefs of staff wanted to authenticate these “pseudo-Hitlers.” To do so, they asked the Nazi officers they had taken prisoner to identify them. A Soviet diplomat who had met the Führer when he was alive was sent from Moscow to participate in the identifications. In the end the result was negative in every case. Officially, none of the bodies shown was Hitler’s.

Very soon the most outlandish rumours began to circulate. Was the dictator really dead, or had he fled? The stubborn silence of the Soviet authorities only amplified these stories, and unleashed the Hitler mystery.

A mystery that we hope to penetrate in the archives of the FSB seven decades after the fall of Berlin. As long as we are granted permission to authenticate the documents we are allowed to examine. In Russia, trust is a desirable but not obligatory precondition.

It is in this deliberately cautious frame of mind that we walk towards the offices of the TsA FSB. In contrast with the other pavements lining Lubyanka Square, the one that runs along the façade of the Lubyanka remains surprisingly empty. Not a pedestrian in sight. Just two uniformed policemen, truncheons in their hands. Our arrival does not go unnoticed. They watch us out of the corner of their eyes. There are no signs indicating the entrance to the building. With our noses in the air and our hesitant walk, we must look like lost tourists. One of the two cops comes towards us with a cross expression on his face. “Photographs are forbidden on this pavement,” he begins by warning us. “You mustn’t stay here, sensitive area, cameras everywhere,” he goes on, pointing with the end of his truncheon at the many cameras bolted onto the window ledges. Our answer amazes him. We’re there because we want to go in, not take photographs, just go in. “Are you sure?” the policeman says, as if he’s sorry for us. Then he continues, turning up the collar of his thick lined jacket, “That’s the entrance there.” It’s in the middle of the building, framed by a heavy block of granite, dark, grey, and sad, with the emblems of the former Soviet Union just above it. If this entrance was chosen to make an impression on the visitor, that goal has been perfectly achieved.

Dmitri is already waiting for us inside. A soldier in ceremonial dress stands between him and us. He must be close to six foot six. Without a word, he brusquely extends a hand towards us. “Passports!” Dmitri explains with a fixed smile. At that precise moment, Lana doesn’t know if I’m going to be able to obtain authorisation to get through the double security door. A stranger in the offices of the FSB, and a journalist to boot–that’s a lot to ask of a Russia in the middle of an international diplomatic crisis. Would a Russian journalist be invited into the offices of the DGSE in Paris, or MI5 in London? Not necessarily. In emails and phone-calls, Lana has found some good arguments for persuading the FSB. But everything could stop at the last minute. A few days previously, the Russian ambassador in Turkey was shot live on television by a Turk in the name of the jihad in Syria. At that point Dmitri nearly cancelled everything. Who knows whether the Kremlin might have changed its mind this morning? Our investigation into the disappearance of Hitler would be halted right there, on the landing of the FSB headquarters, only a few feet away from the confidential evidence.