Operation “Myth” was under threat. The vast counter-inquiry into Hitler’s death faced a considerable obstacle: the Ministry of State Security of the USSR (MGB), under Viktor Abakumov. Abakumov’s representative in Germany, Lieutenant General Zelenin, ordered his staff to oppose head-on the men sent to Berlin by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The investigators had not expected such hostility. They had to face up to the facts: their minister, Sergei Kruglov, carried little weight in the face of Stalin’s right-hand man, the dangerous Abakumov. More than five months of investigations and muscular interrogation to end here… When the discovery of two fragments of skull outside Hitler’s bunker had promised so much.
The Nazi prisoners who had witnessed the Führer’s final moments also felt that something strange was happening. Seven of them had been transferred from their Moscow cell to Berlin. Among them, the usual trio of SS men from Hitler’s inner circle: Heinz Linge, the valet, Hans Baur, the pilot, and Otto Günsche, the aide-de-camp. The only one missing from this line-up was SS General Rattenhuber. And for the good reason that he was in the hands of the MGB. Suspecting that the men from the Ministry of State Security would reply in the negative, the men from the Ministry of Internal Affairs had not even requested his transfer to Berlin. So it was without Rattenhuber that the last witnesses of Hitler’s death were sent to the German capital. This was on 26 April 1946. They had been dragged from the Butyrka prison and thrown on a special train bound for the city of Brest, formerly Brest-Litovsk, in the far west of the USSR, near the Polish border. From there, they had joined another equally secret railway convoy to Berlin. Their journey lasted over a week. To avoid any contact between them, each inmate was placed in isolation in a wagon, unaware of the presence of the others. Years later, after his release from Soviet camps in 1955, Linge would describe that uncomfortable journey: “About a year after the end of the war I was thrust into a barred railway wagon and transported like some wild animal back to Berlin.”* Hans Baur was concerned about the quality of the food: “We travelled for nine days, and during that time our daily rations consisted of some brownish water from the locomotive, half a salt herring and about a pound of bread. We arrived–in Berlin!–half starved.”†
In the German capital they were immediately locked up in the former women’s prison in Lichtenberg. Hans Baur: “We thought that we knew a thing or two about bad prison conditions, but Berlin-Lichtenberg prison under the Russians beat the lot. The warders were sadists who took pleasure in beating up their prisoners. One day my cell door was wrenched open and I was beaten up and left half-unconscious on the floor–vaguely I heard through a mist of pain that it was because I had been sitting on the edge of my bed.”‡ It was no coincidence that the blows and the humiliations were resumed worse than ever during the former SS men’s stay in Berlin. The Russian officers had been ordered to maintain total pressure so as to break any possible psychological resistance. The prisoners were to be made to cooperate unconditionally, because if they were here it was to resolve one of the last mysteries of the end of the war: the identification of the Führer’s body. A Soviet officer asked Baur to stay prepared: “He told me that the bodies of Hitler and his wife had not been burnt at all, but preserved, and that I had been brought to Berlin to identify them.”§ But nothing happened as planned. At the last moment, everything was cancelled. “Actually I was never called upon to inspect any body,” Hitler’s personal pilot notes. And for good reason: Abakumov, the Minister of State Security, was opposed to the idea.
What was to be done? Was the group from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to return to Moscow and confess to Stalin that they had been unable to fulfil their mission? Kruglov, and through him Beria, would never recover. They had to get around the “wall” erected by Abakumov and pursue the investigations. For want of access to the body, the team from operation “Myth” took out their fury on the prisoners they had brought from Moscow. The investigators knew they were playing their final cards. In a few days they would have to write their definitive report and pass it on to the highest level of the Kremlin. Their careers were now at stake. Without waiting, they organised new interrogations and confrontations between the key witnesses as well as reconstructions in the bunker. They called them in one by one. In emergency situations such as this, records were written down directly in German and by hand. As usual, the austere and soldierly Günsche refused to be intimidated. As a field-based SS man used to combat, Hitler’s former aide-de-camp barely unclenched his teeth.
Question: During previous interrogations you gave a set of contradictory and imprecise statements about Hitler’s supposed suicide. Once again, the judge requires accurate and authentic witness statements from you, in which you undertake to tell the truth.
Answer: I wish the whole truth about Hitler’s suicide to be made public, and I have no reason to tell the judge of any inexactitude or lie. My previous declarations correspond to the truth. I gave them in good faith.
To the same question, Linge, the valet, replied like Günsche:
Answer: I declare that my statements made in Moscow in February and March of this year correspond to the reality of the facts. I declare that Hitler is dead and that he died in circumstances that I have already described: on 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide in the bunker which is underneath the garden of the Reich Chancellery [Reichskanzlei] by firing a bullet from a revolver into his head, I assume through his right temple.
When his turn came, air force general Hans Baur, apparently more tense than the others, was much more forthcoming:
Question: Your declarations concerning the fate of Hitler in February and March this year are contradictory and untruthful. We are waiting for sincere statements from you about this question.
Answer: I have told only the truth. I declare that Hitler committed suicide along with Eva Braun in his bunker beneath the Chancellery on 30 April 1945. It happened in the following circumstances: two hours after my farewells to Hitler, I went back to the Führer’s bunker. The bunker was full of cigarette smoke, which surprised me because smoking was forbidden anywhere near Hitler. Dr. Goebbels, Reichsleiter Bormann, Lieutenant General Rattenhuber and about 15 to 20 SS men were talking nervously. I immediately went towards Dr. Goebbels, Rattenhuber and Bormann, who were standing together, and I asked if it was all over. Answer: Absolutely (Jawohl). “Where are the remains?” “They are already up there burning.” I heard the voice of an SS man adding: “He’s already burnt to ashes.” I asked General Rattenhuber how Hitler had killed himself. Answer: With a 0.8 pistol.
The investigators knew that they wouldn’t be able to interview Rattenhuber, Abakumov’s men would never accept it. Luckily, Baur was frail and a physically unwell man. He had never recovered from the loss of his right leg after his attempted escape from the bunker in early May 1945. His mental state was hardly any better. The Soviet informers who shared his cell systematically gave an account of the airman’s mental decline. For the Russian officers, Baur was easy prey. If there was any secret surrounding the dictator’s death, it would be hard for him to conceal it from them. To make him confess, the Soviets would tell a lie to get at the truth.
Question: We have documents attesting that in late April 1945, Hitler was no longer in Berlin. That’s why we see your statements as a refusal to tell the truth, and we demand the truth.
Answer: That is a lie pure and simple. I said my personal farewells immediately before his death. That was on 30 April 1945 between 6 and 7 in the evening [Baur is the only one to give this time between 6:00 and 7:00 pm. According to Linge and Günsche, Hitler committed suicide at about 3:00 pm]. I was summoned to the Führer at the same time as Colonel Betz [Hitler’s second personal pilot, he would be killed by the Soviets in early May 1945 while trying to flee the bunker]. It was completely out of the question that I could have talked to anyone but the real Hitler. Besides, I knew Hitler too well to be fobbed off with someone who looked like him.
Although he didn’t know it, Baur had just put his finger on one of the main doubts of the Russian investigators: the theory of a lookalike! After the fall of Berlin on 2 May 1945, rumours of a “fake Hitler” rapidly circulated around the world. Like any good dictator, would the master of Nazi Germany not have had lookalikes at his disposal to take his place if there was a risk of an assassination attempt? Other dictators often resorted to that strategy. Including Stalin, with his famous “doubles.”
But Baur denied the existence of another “Hitler.” He had never heard of one, he swore. The investigators would take pleasure in destroying what remained of the pilot’s confidence. Hans Höfbeck was a simple Untersturmführer SS, and one of the seven key witnesses transferred from Moscow to Berlin. He too was in the bunker on 30 April 1945, as a member of Hitler’s personal guard. He had been appointed head of the protection service of the Führer’s shelters. What Baur didn’t know was that this NCO had revealed the existence of a double of Hitler in the bunker. A confrontation between Höfbeck and Baur was organised.