Death of Adolf Hitler

File:Hitlertime.jpg

The front cover of Time magazine, May 7 1945. Although he had committed suicide on April 30 and German radio reported Hitler had died in battle on May 1, his death was widely presumed but not yet confirmed. Note that this portrait is historically inaccurate -- Hitler's eyes were blue, not brown.

For fiction about Hitler's death see Hitler in popular culture

The generally accepted cause of the death of Adolf Hitler on April 30, 1945 is suicide by gunshot and cyanide poisoning. The dual method and other circumstances surrounding the event encouraged rumours that Adolf Hitler may have survived the end of World War II along with speculation about what happened to his remains. The 1993 opening of records kept by the Russian KGB and FSB confirmed the widely accepted version of the death of Hitler as described by Hugh Trevor-Roper in his book The Last Days of Hitler published in 1947. The Russian archives did, however, shed some new light on what happened to the cadaver.

Standard account of Hitler's death

Adolf Hitler fled to the Führerbunker on January 16, 1945, where he presided over a rapidly disintegrating Third Reich as the Allies advanced from both east and west. By late April, Soviet forces had entered Berlin and were battling their way to the centre of the city where the Chancellery was located.

On April 22, 1945, Hitler had an apparent nervous breakdown during one of his military situation conferences, and admitted defeat was imminent and Germany would lose the war. He expressed his intent to commit suicide, but Joseph Goebbels convinced him to wait. Hitler asked physician Werner Haase to recommend a method of suicide that would ensure his death. Haase suggested combining a dose of cyanide with a gunshot to the head.

Hitler had a supply of cyanide capsules which he obtained through the SS. Meanwhile on April 28 Hitler learned of Heinrich Himmler's attempt to independently negotiate a peace treaty. Hitler considered this treason and began to show signs of paranoia, expressing worries the cyanide capsules he had received through Himmler's SS were fake. To verify the capsules' potency he ordered Dr. Haase to test them on his dog Blondi and the test was successful.

Hitler, having dictated his last will and testament to secretary Traudl Junge, signed them at 04:00 on April 29. Shortly after midnight on April 29, 1945, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in a map room within the bunker complex, before finally retiring to bed at around 04:00.

Shortly after noon on April 30 Hitler had a short meeting with Bormann before eating a small lunch consisting of spaghetti with a light sauce. 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 14:30, as Soviet forces raised their banner over the neighbouring Reichstag, Adolf and Eva Hitler went into Hitler's personal study.

Some witnesses later reported hearing a loud gunshot at around 15:30 (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 at right temple, with an exit wound towards the top, left side of his head, with a 7.65 mm pistol which lay at his feet. Blood was dripping from Adolf's temple/chin and had made a large stain on the right arm of the sofa and pool on the floor/carpet. Eva had no visible physical wounds and Linge assumed she had poisoned herself.

Several witnesses stated the two bodies were carried up to ground level and through the bunker's emergency exit to a small, bombed-out garden behind the Chancellery 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 after 18:00.

Later Russian disclosures

Cover of US newspaper The Stars and Stripes, May 2, 1945.

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 information to the public in 1993, releasing records and statements by former KGB members. Drawing from these, historians reached a consensus about what happened to the bodies of Hitler and Braun.

Red Army troops began storming the Chancellery at approximately 23:00, about 7 hours and 30 minutes after Hitler's death. On May 2 the remains of Hitler, Braun and two dogs (thought to be Blondi and her offspring Wulf) were discovered in a shell crater by Ivan Churakov of the 79th Rifle Corps (Commonly referred to as 79th SMERSH).

After the autopsy, which (contrary to public reports authorized by Stalin in 1945) recorded both gunshot damage to Hitler's skull and glass shards in his jaw, 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. Fearing the possibility that 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) secretly exhumed the bodies and thoroughly burned them before dumping the ashes in the Elbe river.

Miscellanea

• 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.

• During Hitler's last lunch of spaghetti with a "light sauce," according to the secretaries who ate with him, conversation revolved around dog breeding and how lipstick was made from sewer grease. Both were topics Hitler had brought up on numerous past mealtime occasions. Eva preferred not to eat lunch on that day.

• There was a rumour that the fragment of Hitler's skull from the Archives was presented as a gift to Stalin, who then used it as an ashtray. 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.

• Hitler's eyes are shown as brown on the TIME magazine cover, but in reality they were light blue.

See also

• List of suicides
• Nazi mysticism

Dramatizations

• Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973) is a movie depicting the days leading up to Adolf Hitler's death, starring Sir Alec Guinness.
• The Bunker (1978) by James O'Donnell, describing the last days in the Führerbunker from 1945-01-17 to 1945-05-02. Made into the TV movie The Bunker (1981), starring Anthony Hopkins.
• 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler - Die letzte Stunde im Führerbunker (100 years of Adolf Hitler - the last hour in the Führerbunker) (1989) is a German movie by provocateur Christoph Schlingensief filmed in realtime on location in the remains of the Führerbunker depicting the events in an absurd way as in a madhouse.
• Schtonk! (1992), a satirical German movie revolving around the fake of the Hitler Diaries, starts with the burning of the Hitlers' corpses, which is foiled initially by them refusing to catch fire.
• Der Untergang (2004) is a German movie about the last days of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. It also features interviews with Traudl Junge.

References

• O'Donnell, James - The Bunker. - New York: Da Capo Press; Reprint(2001). - ISBN 0-306-80958-3.
• Waite, Robert G.L. - The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. - New York: First DaCapo Press Edition, 1993 (orig. pub. 1977). - ISBN 0-306-80514-6.
• 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 0-393-03914-5
• Gardner, Dave - The Last of the Hitlers, BMM, Worcester, UK, 2001. ISBN 0-9541544-0-1
• Beevor, Antony, Berlin - The Downfall 1945, Penguin Books, 2004
• Ryan, Cornelius, The Last Battle, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1966
• After the Battle, No.61 Special Edition, Battle of Britain International Ltd, 1988, London

Further reading

Main article: List of Adolf Hitler books

• The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper 1947. University Of Chicago Press; Reprint (1992). ISBN 0-226-81224-3
• Inside Hitler's Bunker : The Last Days of the Third Reich by Joachim Fest, ISBN 0-374-13577-0
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer 1959. Simon & Schuster; ISBN 0-671-62420-2

External links

• The Death of Hitler
• Der Untergang at IMDb
• BBC article on the public display of Hitler's skull fragment
• Washington Post article on the death of Hitler