BERLIN, 2 MAY 1945

The capital of the Third Reich has just fallen. Some hours previously, at about 8:30 in the morning, the military commander of Berlin, General Helmuth Weidling, had ordered his troops to stop fighting. A decision taken immediately after the announcement of Hitler’s suicide. Weidling believed that the disappearance of the Führer freed the men from their vow to fight to the death. “On 30 April 1945, the Führer took his own life and thus abandoned those who had sworn loyalty to him. […] Every additional hour of battle prolongs the suffering of the civilians of Berlin and of our wounded,” he wrote in his public declaration. “In accord with the High Command of Soviet troops, I order you to stop fighting immediately.”

For the Allied staff, a new race against the clock began. Who would be first to lay hands on the Nazi dictator? Was he really dead, or was it a trick by the Nazis? The Soviets had the advantage of the terrain. The city remained under their control until the Potsdam Conference on 17 July 1945. Berlin would then be divided into four zones, one for each of the Allies: the United States, United Kingdom, France and, of course, the Soviet Union. The district around the Chancellery where the Führerbunker was located would be in the sector under Russian command.

Since they didn’t know with any certainty and didn’t just want to imagine things, the Soviet, American, British and, to a lesser extent, French investigators would spend the next few months questioning, counter-questioning and checking. And always that same question: what happened in the Führerbunker on 30 April? All those Nazis who had, intimately or otherwise, witnessed Hitler’s final hours became essential sources of information. And at least on the Soviet side, prisoners were immediately placed in solitary confinement. The secret services of the USSR almost systematically refused to share what they knew with their allies. No sooner was the war over than suspicion, indeed defiance, gained the upper hand.

The Russian archives of that period offer a gripping picture of those investigations carried out in the emergency setting of occupied Berlin. Stalin wanted to remain the sole conqueror of Nazi Germany, and didn’t for a moment envisage sharing his victory or his ultimate trophy: the Führer’s body. For the Soviet investigators, the task was twofold: to get there first and find Hitler.

Moscow mobilised the best parts of the secret services and the Red Army. Those men and women knew they would be putting their careers, even their lives, on the line within a few days.

Step one: find witnesses.

On the morning of 2 May 1945, while most of the German troops in Berlin capitulated, the area around the New Chancellery had still not been secured. In spite of their fury and their determination to die rather than lay down their arms, the last Nazi fanatics ended up being swept by machine-gun fire and shells. Immediately, the underground shelters were inspected by the troops of the 3rd Shock Army. They discovered terrified men and women almost deafened by whole days of bombing. They were wounded, tired, hungry. Some of them wore civilian clothes, others German army uniforms. The chaos was total. How could anyone recognise the members of Hitler’s inner circle in this crowd? A security cordon had been put in place. No one was to be allowed to leave without being questioned. But everything was going too quickly, and the risk of suicide attacks remained real. After a few hours the Soviets had to admit: everyone close to Hitler had escaped.

Apart from Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Krebs, Burgdorf and Schädle, who had committed suicide, everyone had left the bunker the previous night. It was difficult to know with any certainty how many people had still been inside Hitler’s shelter. At the maximum, about thirty, including at least four women, three secretaries, and the Führer’s personal cook. Their escape began at around 11 o’clock at night. To limit the risk of being captured, they divided themselves up into a dozen small groups. At thirty-minute intervals they left the government district via the tunnels of the underground. Once they were in the open air, amid the hubbub of the bombs and the street fighting, some tried their chances westward, others towards the north. A few exceptions aside, they wouldn’t stay free for long. Most of them would fall into the hands of the Red Army within a few hours. The others would be arrested by the British or the Americans. In the general confusion, they joined thousands of German prisoners and tried to melt into the crowd by trying to pass for private soldiers. Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, had teamed up with Erich Kempka, the Führer’s personal chauffeur. The two men quickly parted ways as they progressed along the blazing streets. Linge decided to seek refuge in the tram tunnels. As he approached a passageway leading to the surface, he thought he heard German soldiers. “From above I heard the call: ‘German panzers are advancing. Come up, comrades!’ I leaned out of the shaft and saw a German soldier. He looked towards me and beckoned. Scarcely had I left our hiding place than I saw all the Soviet tanks around me.”^* The German soldier was bait for capturing fugitives. Linge hurried to remove the SS badges from his uniform, the silver eagle and the swastika, as well as his rank. The strategy worked, because the Russian soldiers, so overjoyed by the end of fighting, even offered him cigarettes. His true identity would only be revealed several days later thanks to the carelessness of another eminent member of Hitler’s close guard: his personal pilot Hans Baur.

Erich Kempka was luckier. On 2 May, while escaping and after leaving Linge, he was quick to swap his SS uniform for civilian clothes. A few hours later, when he was checked by the Red Army, he was easily able to pass for a German worker. He managed to leave Berlin and got to Munich a few hours later. In the end he was captured by the American forces that occupied that part of Germany.

Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary and certainly his closest confidant, was nowhere to be found. Rumours soon began to spread. He had fled with Hitler, some people claimed; he was killed while trying to escape, others said. In the end his body was found in December 1972 in Berlin, during some road maintenance. In 1973 he would be identified by a comparative examination of his teeth against his dental file. Then, in 1998, tests were carried out on DNA taken from the supposed bones of Bormann and compared to those of his children. The results were positive.

During May 1945, the Soviets captured more prisoners from the Führerbunker than all the Allies put together had managed to do. But it didn’t make their investigation any less complex, especially because of the internal quarrels raging within the different army units and the many Soviet secret services. Everyone jealously guarded their spoils of war and resisted allowing their “precious” prisoners to be interrogated by anyone other than their own services. The man in charge of the first investigation into Hitler’s death was Aleksandr Anatolevich Vadis, the head of the SMERSH unit of the 1st Belorussian Front. The 1st Belorussian Front, led by Marshal Zhukov, was one of the main Soviet army units involved in the battle of Berlin. SMERSH was created in 1934 specifically to hunt down deserters, traitors, and other spies within the Red Army. SMERSH is the contraction of two Russian words: Smiert Shpionam, which may be translated as “Death to spies.” Very quickly, SMERSH became a counter-espionage service directly attached to Stalin’s authority. Vadis was one of Stalin’s men. In May 1945 this brilliant officer was thirty-nine and held the rank of lieutenant general. Vadis was anything but a beginner. He had joined the security service of the Red Army in 1930, Soviet counter-espionage in 1942 and then SMERSH the following year. A convinced Stalinist, with a formidable sense of political intrigue, he escaped the successive military purges leading up to the war against Germany. Stalin considered him one of the best men in his counter-espionage service. Logically enough, Vadis was granted every power to take his investigation to its conclusion. He was answerable to no one in Berlin. He reported only to Stalin and his closest circle, including the head of security for the USSR, Lavrenti Beria. No one else was informed of his mission. Even Hitler’s conqueror, Marshal Zhukov, was kept at arm’s length. He would never know anything about Vadis’s work. And besides, from the afternoon of 2 May, when the Führerbunker was definitely secured by the soldiers of the Red Army, the men of SMERSH of the 1st Belorussian Front took control of it, expelled the Soviet army, and forbade access even to senior officers.

On 27 May 1945, Vadis sent the report that Moscow had been so eagerly waiting for. In spite of the means at his disposal, Stalin’s envoy hadn’t performed any miracles. For want of time, he was unable to interrogate the last witnesses to Hitler’s last days. On the other hand, the master spy was able to present the result of the autopsy carried out on the alleged corpse of the Nazi dictator.

But before that, he explained the circumstances under which the body was located.

On 5 May, on the basis of witness statements of an inmate, the officer from the security police of the Reich Chancellery, Oberscharführer [adjutant] Mengershausen, two burnt bodies of a man and a woman were discovered and exhumed in the city of Berlin, in the grounds of the Reich Chancellery, near the emergency exit of Hitler’s bunker. The bodies were found in a crater created by a shell and covered with a layer of earth. They were so badly burned that without additional data they could not be identified.

As so often with the Soviet secret services, the information contained in their reports had to be checked with extreme care. Here, Vadis was lying.

Elena Rzhevskaya was an interpreter within the SMERSH team of the 1st Belorussian Front, as was Lev Bezymenski, but within the 1st Belorussian Front itself. They were in Berlin on 2 May 1945. According to them, Hitler’s alleged corpse was not found on 5 May 1945 but on the previous day, and not on the instructions of Oberscharführer Mengershausen but by chance, thanks to the Soviet soldier Private Ivan Chourakov. According to Rzhevskaya and Bezymenski, Churakov, in the company of Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko of the 3rd Schock Army, had returned to inspect the place where Joseph and Magda Goebbels had been discovered on 2 May. It was 11 o’clock on the morning of 4 May when, just beside them, from a shell crater, Churakov called to Klimenko: “Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, there are legs here!”^* The men started digging and disinterred not one body but two. Klimenko did not imagine for a moment that these might be the remains of Hitler and his wife. So he gave the order to have them re-interred. He did so because the previous day another body had already been identified by some Nazi prisoners as being Hitler’s. At 2:00 pm, Klimenko learned that, in the end, the authentication was not conclusive: they couldn’t be sure it was Hitler. The next day, on 5 May, Klimenko asked his men to dig up the two bodies found the previous day and inform his hierarchy.

This version of the discovery of the supposed bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun is a partial match with the secret document in the FSB archives that we have been able to examine–the document co-signed on 5 May 1945 by the same Private Chourakov about the discovery of two charred bodies. On the other hand, there is no mention anywhere of Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko. Elena Rzhevskaya also wondered about the officer’s extraordinary discretion. He simply replied: “I never delivered a report about the bodies to anybody.”^†

As to the burnt bodies revealed on 4 May 1945, Elena Rzhevskaya claimed to have seen them: “The human remains, disfigured by fire, black and horrible, were wrapped in grey, soil-stained blankets.”^*

Had Vadis, only, been informed about the conditions under which the two corpses had been found? As the uncontested head of counter-espionage in Berlin, it was his duty to know everything. But even if he did know that version, his decision to hide it remains comprehensible. He didn’t want to inform the Kremlin about the weird discovery. Still, he was taking a considerable risk in altering the truth. All the more so since everything had been recorded in a report sent to Moscow. Vadis was unaware of that detail because, as usual, the Soviet authorities kept all their information close to their chests, even within the secret services.

The other thing Vadis neglected to mention was that the two bodies had been stolen from the 5th Shock Army, which had been entrusted by Moscow with control of the Chancellery district. Stolen by members of its SMERSH unit. They had taken the initiative of not letting the 5th Shock Army get their hands on such precious booty. Discreetly, during the night of 5–6 May, the human remains were wrapped in blankets and placed in ammunition boxes. Elena Rzhevskaya was involved in this kidnapping: “the bodies were passed over the garden gate and loaded onto a truck.”^† That was the perfect illustration of the absurd internal conflicts within the Soviet units. For the SMERSH commandos, if those bodies did indeed belong to Hitler and his wife, no one but them in Berlin must know. On 6 May, the two boxes were stored in the new headquarters of SMERSH, in the Berlin district of Buch.

Vadis obviously didn’t say a word about this “theft” in his report. He wanted to keep the secret about the existence of these bodies.

But let’s return to his report about the interrogation of Mengershausen, which he conducted on 13 May 1945:

Mengershausen announced that he had recognised the bodies of the man and the woman as those of the Chancellor of the German Reich, Hitler, and his wife, Eva Braun. He added that he had personally seen their bodies being burned on 30 April in the following circumstances: on 30 April, at 10 am, Mengershausen was in the security service of the Reich Chancellery, patrolling the corridor with the kitchen and the dining room of the Reich Chancellery. At the same time, he had the task of keeping watch over the garden of Hitler’s bunker, which was 80 metres from the building where Mengershausen was working.

During his patrol he met Hitler’s orderly, Baur, who informed him of the suicides of Hitler and his wife Eva Braun.

An hour after the meeting with BAUR, leaving the terrace 80 metres from Hitler’s shelter, Mengershausen saw Sturmbannführer GÜNSCHE, personal aide-de-camp, and Sturmbannführer LINGE, Hitler’s valet, leaving the shelter by the emergency exit carrying in their arms Hitler’s body, which they placed a metre and a half from the exit. Then they went back in, and a few minutes later brought the body of his wife Eva Braun and set it down near Hitler’s body. Beside the bodies there were two canisters of petrol; GÜNSCHE and LINGE began pouring it over the bodies and then set light to them.

When the bodies were reduced to ashes, two men from Hitler’s personal guard (whose names are unknown to him) who had come out of the shelter approached the burned bodies, put them in a hole dug by the impact of a shell and covered them with a layer of soil.

Vadis based his entire demonstration on the witness of a single German soldier, Harri Mengershausen. But the scene that he described so precisely was played out 80 metres away. A respectable distance that made all identification risky. Vadis was plainly aware of this, as the next part of his report reveals:

Asked how he recognised the bodies that had come out of the bunker as those of Hitler and his wife Braun, the prisoner Mengershausen stated: “I recognised Hitler from his face, his size and his uniform.”

The SS adjutant even managed to give some details concerning the clothing: Hitler was wearing black trousers, a tie, a white shirt; Eva Braun a black dress. “I’ve seen her several times in that dress,” Mengershausen added. “I also knew her face very well. It was oval, the nose straight and thin, the hair light-coloured. So since I knew Frau Braun well, I can affirm that it was her body that was removed from the shelter.”

Once again, Vadis probably didn’t imagine that he could convince his superiors on the basis of a witness statement of a low-ranking SS man. While he was well aware of this, as in a good detective novel he also knew how to spin out the suspense. Here is his trump card, the one that he would claim as his ultimate proof:

The fact that the corpses discovered are really those of Hitler and his wife is confirmed by the statements of Heusermann, the technical assistant to the dentist Blaschke who tended to Hitler, his wife Braun, Goebbels and his family, as well as other rulers of the Reich.

Käthe Heusermann, Vadis’s treasure, his key witness. She was the young woman whose biography and anthropometric photographs have been handed down to us by the services of the DSB. The identification of the most wanted man on the planet rests entirely on the shoulders of a medical assistant in her early thirties.

Wasn’t this another instance of slightly shaky testimony? Vadis had no choice. His services had looked everywhere in Berlin, and there was no sign of the dentist Blaschke. According to Heusermann he had taken refuge in Berchtesgaden, far from the Soviet-controlled zone. That was true. Blaschke would be captured by the Americans. In the absence of the dentist, Vadis had to make do with his assistant. That was why he tried to stress Käthe Heusermann’s expertise.

During the interrogation she revealed that she had on several occasions helped Dr Blaschke in the treatment of Hitler and Braun’s teeth. Furthermore, she had described in detail the state of the teeth in Hitler’s upper and lower jaw […].

It was only after checks on the young woman’s real knowledge of Hitler’s medical dossier that the jaws were presented to her.

Having identified these bridges and teeth as belonging to Hitler, Heusermann declared: “I state that the bridges and teeth presented to me belong to Hitler according to the following indications: on the upper jaw presented here I see a clear scratch left by the drill when the gold bridge after the 4th tooth had been sawn. I know this trace very well, because the operation had been performed in autumn 1944 by Dr Blaschke with my participation to remove Hitler’s sixth tooth. Here we also see all the characteristics of Hitler’s bridges and teeth about which I had given depositions during my interrogation.”

Vadis’s demonstration stops there. He does go on to cite one other witness, Fritz Echtmann, the other German prisoner mentioned by the FSB during our visit. A dental prosthetist, he had also worked with Hitler’s dentist. Vadis used him to identify Eva Braun’s teeth.

And where were the remains of the two bodies? Vadis lingers at length on the jaws but remains curiously brief concerning the autopsy on the bodies.

After examination of Hitler’s charred body and that of his wife Braun, the forensic team concluded that because of the great damage done to the body and the head by the fire, no visible signs of serious injuries were discovered. In the oral cavities of Hitler and Braun they found the remains of crushed capsules of cyanide. Laboratory analysis of these showed that they were identical to those detected in the bodies of Goebbels and members of his family.

Nothing more. And yet the forensic examination surely deserves more than a few lines at the end of the report.

The details of that autopsy remain confidential even today. Neither at GARF nor at TsA FSB were we able to consult the complete conclusions.

At most we managed to glean factual information disseminated in other confidential reports. That is how we know the identities of the team that carried out the medico-legal study led by the coroner of the 1st Belorussian Front, Lieutenant Colonel Faust Chkaravski. We also know that the examination took place in the north-east of Berlin, in the district of Buch, on 8 May 1945, the day of the signing of the German surrender.

As to the results of the autopsy, this is what we found in an NKVD report dated 19 January 1946.

The presumed body of Hitler

(file dated 8 May 1945)

No visible signs of severe fatal damage or illness were discovered on the severely fire-damaged body.

The presence in the oral cavity of the remains of the crushed glass capsule, the obvious smell of bitter almonds coming from the corpse and the results of the forensic analysis of the internal organs with the detection of cyanide led the commission to conclude that in the present case death was caused by cyanide poisoning.

The presumed body of Eva Braun

(file dated 8 May 1945)

On the roughly charred body traces of fragmentation wounds to the rib cage were found, with haemothorax, damage to the lung and the pericardium and six small metal shards.

Also, in the oral cavity, the remains of a crushed glass capsule were found.

Taking into consideration the presence of the capsule, the smell of bitter almonds which was apparent during the autopsy on the corpse as well as the result of the medical-chemical study of the organs of the body, which detected cyanide in them, the commission concluded that in spite of the presence of the severe injury to the rib cage, the direct cause of death was cyanide poisoning.

The commission also notes that because of the marked changes to the body caused by fire, the only proof regarding the identification of the corpses can be given by the analysis of teeth, of crowns and dentures which are preserved in the oral cavity.

For greater detail about the autopsies, we must turn to Lev Bezymenski, the bilingual Russian-German interpreter who served in the Red Army. In 1968, it was as a journalist that this Soviet citizen wrote a successful book about the death of Hitler and had it published in West Germany. Europe was embroiled in the Cold War and the USSR was under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev. The publication of such a book was possible only if the Soviet authorities gave their agreement, and above all if they considered it to be in their interest. This point is not unimportant. Was Bezymenski telling the truth, or was he passing on propaganda from the Communist regime? Be that as it may, he explains in great detail how Soviet forces found Hitler’s body and how they succeeded in identifying it.

He even allowed himself the luxury of illustrating his words with hitherto unpublished documents such as photographs of Russian soldiers outside Hitler’s bunker. The caption states that they are busy “disinterring the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun.” There are also two photographs of members of the autopsy commission standing neatly in a row, with the bodies of General Krebs and Joseph Goebbels in front of them. No photograph of the autopsy of Hitler or Eva Braun however–the man in charge of the autopsy, Faust Chkaravski, claims that he was forbidden to photograph it.^* Bezymenski did, however, publish two poor-quality photographs in which one can see two wooden boxes filled with a shapeless dark mass. If we believe the captions, these photographs show the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun.

Apart from these historic iconographic pieces, Bezymenski claims to have obtained all the autopsy reports on the bodies discovered in the Führerbunker. Those of Goebbels, of General Krebs, of the two German shepherd dogs and, of course, the bodies claimed to be those of Hitler and Eva Braun.

The tone employed in this book is deliberately political. For example, Bezymenski writes that “the medical evidence, incidentally, refutes the frequent declarations in western historical studies on the fact that General Hans Krebs, the last head of the general staff of the German land army, died like a soldier by killing himself with his weapon. […] The medical conclusions say: ‘Death by cyanide poisoning.’”^†

It is all in this passage: the almost ideological opposition to the West; here the Soviet truth is based on scientific facts and can see through Western manipulations. Then there is the denigration of the Nazi enemy. So Krebs killed himself with poison, the act of a coward in the eyes of the Soviets. For Moscow, a real soldier would only commit suicide with a bullet.

Something that holds even more for a war lord.

It is no surprise that the autopsy on the body attributed to Hitler gives the following results according to Bezymenski:

The man is almost 165 centimetres tall (according to the statements of his personal physician, Dr. Morell, Hitler was 176 centimetres tall and weighed 70 kilos), and his age between fifty and sixty (estimation based on his general development, the size of the organs, the state of the lower incisors and the right premolar). Some pieces of glass from a medical capsule were found in the mouth. The forensic examiners stress “the typical smell of bitter almonds coming from the bodies, and the forensic examinations of the internal organs which established the presence of cyanide…”

The commission reached the conclusion that “death was caused by cyanide-based poison.”^*

The Soviet medical team also recorded the absence of part of the skull: the part from the back left, which was supposed to correspond to the piece stored today in the GARF archives.

According to Bezymenski, the doctors claimed to smell a strong odour of bitter almonds from these charred bodies, which had been buried, on the understanding that they were those of Hitler and his wife, five days earlier. Is it possible for cyanide to emanate such an odour with such persistence? And why does Bezymenski not retranscribe the results of the toxicological analyses of the organs of the two bodies? He writes only: “The chemical tests of the internal organs have established the presence of cyanide.”

It was of no consequence to the former Red Army interpreter. The goal was to present as certain the cause of the death of the man under examination: poison. At no point is the impact of a bullet mentioned. If this body was that of Hitler, it would have meant that the dictator had committed suicide with a cyanide capsule.

QED: Hitler was a coward like the head of his chief of staff, General Krebs, and of course Goebbels.

This desire on the part of the Kremlin to present the Nazi leaders as “subhuman” is apparent from the announcement of Hitler’s suicide to Stalin. On no account was his enemy to pass for a hero. So, if the German dictator stayed in Berlin to the end, in spite of the bombs, it was not because he was courageous, but because of his destructive madness.

The Lieutenant General of SMERSH, Aleksandr Vadis, says exactly the same thing in his report dated 27 May 1945 and addressed to Beria, Stalin’s right-hand man.

Beria took account of it and then passed it directly to Stalin.

As to the proof that the body was indeed Hitler’s–the teeth. They were sent secretly to the Kremlin.

The H file was about to be closed. Stalin could tell the whole world that he had found Hitler, that he was dead, that he had died like a coward in his rat hole.

Except that one man had revealed to the NKVD secret services that Vadis and SMERSH were wrong. This man was none other than Otto Günsche, Hitler’s aide and bodyguard. He too was captured by the Soviets after his attempt to escape the bunker, and very quickly identified. His first interrogation called everything into question. He was categorical on the matter: the Führer had fired a bullet into his head!

* Heinz Linge, With Hitler to the End, op. cit., p. 210.

* Lev Bezymenski, The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969, p. 45.

† Elena Rzhevskaya, Carnets, op. cit., p. 273.

* Ibid., p. 276.

† Ibid. p. 277.

* Elena Rzhevskaya, Carnets, op. cit., p. 339.

† Lev Bezymenski, The Death of Adolf Hitler, op. cit., p. 57.

* Ibid., p. 67.