THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER/DW DOCOUMANTARY
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On May 1, 1945, the battle for Berlin had been raging for two weeks.
The capital of the Third Reich lay in ruins.
While the Nazi leadership still refused to sign an unconditional surrender,
Soviet troops continued to fight their way toward Fuehrer's bunker
in a house-to-house battle.
Their ultimate goal was to capture the leader of the Third Reich.
Hitler was the symbol of the war and of fascism, a trophy that everybody wanted.
But where was Hitler?
Soviet soldiers found 6 children's corpses in the garden of the Reich Chancellery,
2 charred bodies, as well as skull fragments and teeth.
And what did these two young women have to do with the search?
One was Elena Rzhevskaya, a Red Army interpreter, and
the other was a German, Käthe Heusermann, the assistant to Hitler's dentist.
Both played a decisive role in the identification of Hitler’s remains.
The witness states: I clearly recognize the gold teeth and the dentures I was shown.
Stalin was immediately informed about the remains and their identification.
He now knew that Hitler was dead.
Yet: 7 weeks later, at the Potsdam Conference, Stalin told his Western allies
that the dictator was in good health and had probably defected.
Why didn't Stalin tell his Allies?
Probably because keeping it a secret could prove useful.
The story of Hitler's death shows how suspicious Stalin was of the West.
Stalin's lie about Hitler's death was upheld for almost 50 years.
All proof of Hitler’s death was kept under wraps until the Soviet Union became history.
Only then was the truth finally told.
Nothing can be hidden. Everything comes out in the end.
For the Soviet Union, WW II began in June 1941 after a surprise invasion by Hitler.
Within a few months, the enemy was outside Moscow.
Stalin ordered the mass mobilization of the population.
The poorly equipped regiments that marched across the Red Square
were sent directly to the front.
Elena was just 22 and the mother of a 2-year-old son.
But the Red Army needed interpreters and Elena, who spoke German, volunteered.
4 years later, she was part of the Soviet unit in Berlin
that was trying to track down Nazi leaders.
Nobody knew where Hitler was. There were rumors of him lying dead or dying,
a victim of a brain hemorrhage. Or that he had taken his own life.
But according to Soviet radio, Hitler was alive and well and in hiding in the Alps.
It was said that a double was fighting in his place on the streets of Berlin,
and Nazi propaganda was only waiting for his death
to present the Allies with appropriate photos.
Another rumor claimed that Hitler was hiding in the ruins of the Reichstag.
Capturing the Reichstag was a historical moment.
The red flag above the parliament building symbolized victory over the Third Reich.
It was our unit that led the attack on the Reichstag.
We were lucky, it was a great honor for us.
They stormed the Reichstag thinking Hitler was hiding there.
But really, nobody knew where he was.
But Hitler wasn't in the Reichstag. It had burned down in 1933.
The Red Army front line headed to the Chancellery, the former heart of Nazi power.
It was exciting to imagine Hitler could still be there. We were on edge.
But where was Hitler? Was he alive or dead?
German radio announced the death of the Führer,
who “fell in his heroic battle against Bolshevism".
Shortly afterward, German Chief of Staff, Hans Krebs, went to Soviet Headquarters.
He wanted to begin surrender negotiations and told Marshall Georgy Zhukov
about Hitler's death.
So while bitter fighting continued on the streets of Berlin,
the small Soviet advance unit with Elena, the interpreter, reached the Chancellery.
Close by was the bunker where Hitler had possibly been hiding for several months.
They found a chaotic scene: the ground plowed with shells, and corpses lying everywhere.
They quickly recognized one body: Joseph Goebbels.
Then those of his wife Magda and their 6 children.
Hitler's body hadn't yet been found, but the next day,
the news of his death made the headlines worldwide.
Except in the Soviet Union:
Pravda, the official Communist Party newspaper, and voice of the Kremlin, wrote
that the claim Hitler was dead was a ruse to enable him to escape.
Similarly, in Paris, L’Humanité questioned the report.
Meanwhile, on the grounds of the Chancellery,
the search for Hitler’s body continued among the rubble and corpses.
One of them closely resembled the dictator, especially because of the typical mustache.
Excitement and restlessness spread. Experts were called in.
But despite the resemblance and the beard, it was clear that it was not Hitler.
Nevertheless: the legend of a double was born.
All Soviet troops marching into Berlin were ordered to keep an eye out for Hitler.
But the real search was done in secret and carried out by only 3 people:
Major Gorbushin, Major Bystrov, and their interpreter Elena.
She was needed to help question German soldiers and officers.
The two officers were part of SMERSH, the Soviet military intelligence during WW II.
On May 4, I spoke to the bunker's heating engineer.
He had installed the ventilation system in the rooms Hitler lived in.
He saw the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun being taken out of the bunker.
After questioning the first German prisoners,
investigators were convinced that Hitler had held out in the bunker until the end.
And that he had taken his own life shortly before the first Soviet troops arrived.
It was also known that on the afternoon of April 30, the day of his supposed suicide,
all the gasoline kept in the Chancellery for emergencies had been used up.
Had Hitler disappeared without a trace? Or had he ordered his body to be burned?
Could his remains still be found? And if so, where?
The bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were discovered completely by chance.
In the garden of the Chancellery, a soldier saw the tip of a boot in good condition
sticking out of a hole in the ground.
He decided to take it and found two dead bodies.
They didn't know if it was really Hitler. They were able to identify Goebbels
because less petrol had been used to burn his corpse.
But these remains were burnt to a cinder.
The corpses of the Goebbels family, several officers, and the still unidentified remains.
SMERSH now had to identify around a dozen bodies, charred to varying degrees.
Vice admiral Hans-Erich Voss confessed he was among the last to see Goebbelsand Hitler alive.
Identifying Goebbels wasn't a problem, but was this really the corpse of Hitler?
The autopsy proved inconclusive.
The doctors could not - unlike with Goebbels - say
with absolute certainty whether the remains were really those of the dictator.
The last hope was his teeth.
The upper jaw was well preserved. The lower jaw, too. He still had fifteen teeth.
On May 8, my superior officer, Major Gorbushin, told me to go and see him.
He gave me a burgundy colored box and said:
"These are Hitler's teeth. You're responsible for them.”
On May 8th, the guns fell silent as the unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht
came into effect - people celebrated the end of a war that claimed millions of victims.
But Elena stayed away from the victory celebrations.
Instead, she carefully guarded a box lined with red satin.
It probably contained Hitler's final remains.
In Berlin-Karlshorst, representatives of the Allies
and German Field Marshal General Wilhelm Keitel met at Soviet headquarters.
Overseen by Marshal Zhukov, they signed the surrender document of the German Wehrmacht
on the night of May 9th.
The war in Europe was now officially over.
The next morning, Elena and the two officers set off to track down Hitler's dentist.
Maybe he could say for certain if these were Hitler’s teeth.
But they knew neither the dentist’s name nor his address.
Or even if he was still alive.
Finally, they found out his name and that he had left the city two weeks earlier.
But they also learned that his assistant had stayed in Berlin,
hoping for her soldier husband to return from the front.
A few hours later, Elena met Käthe Heusermann.
A young, cheerful woman,
who for almost ten years, had assisted at every one of Hitler's dentist visits.
So the Führer's teeth held no secrets for her.
She became the main witness.
The teeth meant nothing if you could not find the person to identify them.
Questioning of Käthe Heusermann.
The witness states: I clearly recognize the gold teeth and the dentures I was shown.
They belong to Chancellor Hitler. The witness makes the same statement for Eva Braun.
This testimony is very important. Now it is proven that the teeth truly belong to Hitler.
We asked her to sketch Hitler's teeth, without showing her the teeth we had found.
Käthe hadn't forgotten about Hitler's terrible dental health.
Her sketch corresponded exactly to the jaw found by the Soviets. It removed all doubt.
The burnt corpse found in a hole in the Chancellery garden was Hitler’s.
So Hitler was dead. But how would Stalinhandle this information?
For the Soviet leadership in Berlin, it was clear Hitler was dead.
And Stalin was informed immediately.
To not give Stalin an accurate report on the subject was out of the question.
Hitler was a symbol of huge political importance,
like the taking of the Reichstag and the conquest of Berlin.
Stalin hardly emerged from the Kremlin, but he had informers everywhere.
Every day, new documents about Hitler's death and the identification arrived.
They were precise and definite.
After Käthe Heusermann's testimony, it was clear Hitler was dead and Stalin knew it.
However, a few days later, a Soviet general arrived in Berlin to verify the facts.
The general started questioning people again, for the 1st time, Elena, the interpreter,
was warned she would be held responsible in the case of a translation error.
Everybody was given strict instructions and intimidated.
The general sent the trio to find Käthe Heusermann again.
She was told to pack for a week-long absence. Then they took her with them.
Official report of the second questioning of Käthe Heusermann.
It says it started at 01:15 and ended at 06:00. The questions were always the same.
They made her repeat what she knew about Hitler's teeth
and after she'd said everything, they asked the same question:
"so do you still say that the teeth and dentures shown to you belong to Hitler?"
She said, "Yes, I can confirm that."
The document is only five pages long but we know the interview lasted five hours,
so we can imagine how many times they forced her to give the same answers.
The mysterious general didn't sign any official reports.
After the second questioning, which confirmed the first,
he left as suddenly as he had arrived.
The investigators were certain Hitler was dead,
thanks to the formal identification of his teeth by Käthe Heusermann.
But this information remained top secret and the Soviet high command in Berlin
officially continued the search for Hitler, dead or alive.
A medal was even promised to the person who succeeded in capturing him.
Although the SMERSH investigation was undertaken in utmost secrecy,
rumors were circulating outside the Soviet zone
which made their way into the international media.
Had the Russians found and identified the Nazi leader's body?
Everyone waited for Soviet confirmation.
The Kremlin remained silent.
At the end of May 1945, Harry Hopkins, an advisor to US President Harry Truman,
went to Moscow for a series of talks with Stalin to prepare
the first post-war conference between the Big Three.
When Hopkins asked Stalin about Hitler’s whereabouts,
Stalin replied he thought Hitler was alive, and had successfully escaped
and had maybe gone to Japan in a submarine.
It was the first official lie about Hitler's death, told by Stalin himself.
10 days later, Zhukov organized a press conference for foreign journalists.
They expected confirmation of the discovery and identification of Hitler's remains.
But to their surprise, Zhukov announced the opposite...that Hitler had not been found,
he was certainly alive and had managed to flee, perhaps to Spain or Argentina.
Zhukov's claim can only be explained as follows. He obeyed Stalin's orders.
As he hadn't received orders to say the bodies had been identified, he lied.
Why didn’t Stalin tell the Allies?
The answer is not simple and has psychological reasons.
Knowing something others don'tknow is always advantageous.
Keeping a secret can always be useful.
The story of Hitler's death shows how much Stalin distrusted the West.
It was important to him not to give them too much information or evidence.
Maybe one day, it would be useful for us to have left his allies in the dark.
So the lie had been born. There was general consternation
because nobody could imagine that just a month after the joint victory,
the Soviets would lie to their allies about such a subject.
Why? And if so, what was the aim?
It seemed absurd.
No, if Zhukov said Hitler hadn't been found, it was true.
In July, Stalin, Truman, and Churchill met in Potsdam for their first post-war summit.
The talks were to determine the future of Germany and large parts of Eastern Europe.
Tensions between the Soviets and the Western Allies were aggravated
by the Soviet claims on Eastern Europe and the Soviet policies in the areas
occupied by the Red Army.
With so much at stake, the question of Hitler's fate was rather secondary.
A Truman advisor recalled later that during dinner with the US president,
Stalin reaffirmed that: "Hitler is alive and is either in Spain or Argentina."
In Potsdam, the leaders also had to decide
which Nazi leaders would go on trial in a few months’ time in Nuremberg.
Stalin said again: "Hitler is alive."
So he should have been at the top of the list of war criminals.
But oddly, nobody requested him. Not the Americans, nor the English.
Not even Stalin.
Everything was kept secret in case, one day, we could use it.
That is how the Soviet Union operated.
It was all controlled by the intelligence services which observed,
threatened and spread fear everywhere.
Stalin's decision to withhold information that concerned all of the Allies
was the first step by the Soviets toward the Cold War.
For Elena, the time had come to take off her uniform
and put on a nice dress and elegant shoes.
She posed for some souvenir photos and paid the last visit to Käthe,
the main witness to Hitler's death, who was still being held at Soviet HQ.
The two young ladies got on well. And they both shared an important secret.
Their parting exchange was very friendly. Käthe said, "I will soon be free.
Then we can meet up in Berlin and I'll take you to my hairdresser's".
But that never happened.
Meanwhile, the British and the Americans continued to seek
the truth about Hitler’s mysterious disappearance,
and they still counted on Soviet cooperation.
Here's a request from the British and the Americans to Soviet leadership in Berlin
Our generals passed on the request to foreign affairs minister Vyacheslav Molotov
and Stalin, asking for instructions.
What information were they authorized to give and should they cooperate
with the British and the Americans to clarify the details of Hitler's death?
Archives hold a request from intelligence chief Lavrenti Beria to Molotov
to pass on the information to the Allies.
But it seems the Kremlin decided not to allow it.
The lie went around the world and kept the press on alert.
People everywhere reported having seen Hitler.
Nazi sympathizers seized the opportunity to spread the myth Hitler was still alive
and would return to save the Reich.
One of the rumors was particularly annoying for the British:
The Soviets accused them of helping Hitler escape;
and that they were hiding him somewhere in the British-occupied zone
to use him as a bargaining chip against them at the appropriate time.
In order to put an end to such accusations, the British commissioned a young historian,
Hugh Trevor-Roper, to investigate the question of Hitler's whereabouts.
The Russians denied him their support and any access to the Chancellery,
located in the Soviet sector.
But Trevor-Roper found several witnesses in British and American prison camps,
who had experienced the last moments in the Führer's bunker?
The historian was soon certain that Hitler had committed suicide on April 30.
Shortly afterward, his body was burned by his bodyguards.
But Trevor-Roper's report was based solely on testimony from witnesses.
What he lacked was evidence, and most importantly, the body.
That is why he was unable to put a stop to the rumors that were becoming
more and more colorful.
At that time, the FBI received thousands of reports from all over the world
about sightings of Hitler, which were checked and categorized.
In March 1953 the news spread like wildfire around the world: Stalin was dead.
The unscrupulous dictator, a victor of the Second World War, merciless tyrant, and
glorified and hated ruler had died, and nobody knew what would follow
the regime of terror he had maintained for almost 30 years in the Soviet Union.
Beria had the honorable task of delivering the eulogy on Red Square.
The head of Soviet State Intelligence hoped to seize power.
But soon afterward he was arrested, put on trial, sentenced to death, and executed.
KM-long shelves contained the carefully documented secrets of the Stalin regime.
8 years after Hitler’s death,
the truth about his death remained locked away in secret archives.
Only a few remaining eyewitnesses knew the details.
In 1955, Elena was finally free to say and write that Hitler committed suicide.
But nothing more.
Nothing about the investigation, the identification of his remains
and even less about Stalin's lies.
Anyway, who would believe her? Where was the proof?
Among the numerous versions of Hitler's disappearance,
it was now the suicide theory that those in power preferred. But not just any suicide.
The idea that Hitler poisoned himself was much more interesting for propaganda
than if he shot himself in the head.
Suicide by shooting is seen as an act of courage,
while taking poison is a sign of cowardliness.
The 1st lie, told by Stalin, was that Hitler was alive and had succeeded in escaping.
His successors opted for another version, that Hitler had poisoned himself.
That version was spread and repeated until everyone had heard it.
The Brezhnev era began in 1964. One year later, the Soviet leader decided
to commemorate the end of the war by making Victory Day a public holiday.
20 years had passed since the end of the war. In 1965,
Elena wrote about what had happened, what the intelligence services had done.
Elena was now a respected writer. She was obsessed with the lies about Hitler's death.
She wanted to publicize what she knew and dispel the myths.
But to make it credible, it needed to be based on the proof hidden in the archives.
After multiple requests, she finally gained access to some of the documents.
As she was given little time to carry out her research,
Elena frantically copied all of the documents given to her.
She filled five large notebooks.
She could not choose the documents and didn't know what was in the archives.
She had no catalog.
She had to stay sitting in a chair, an official gave her one dossier after another.
The importance and interest of the documents varied hugely.
One day, she opened a dossier with a list of trophies sent from Berlin to Moscow.
Hitler's coat, a paper shredder found in the bunkers,
and the names of Käthe Heusermann and several other Germans.
That's how my grandmother learned Käthe had been sent to Moscow. Like an object.
It was a huge shock. Elena was suddenly transported 20 years into the past,
to the SMERSH interrogation room in Berlin.
She remembered Käthe Heusermann, Hitler's dentist's assistant,
the main witness who had enabled the identification of Hitler's remains.
Elena got on well with the cheerful young woman.
Now she knew Käthe had never been released.
On the morning of June 29, 1945, at 06:00, I was transported with 7 other prisoners
to a Berlin airfield and put on a cargo plane to Moscow.
On arrival, we were immediately taken in a police van to the Lubyanka prison
and put in solitary confinement.
My cell was very small, just 7 steps long and water ran down the black-painted walls.
She didn't know how long they would keep her there. Or what she was accused of.
She did understand why she was in prison.
I spent six years in solitary confinement.
In August 1951, they charged me with helping a bourgeois state prolong the war
by participating in Hitler's dental healthcare.
They said I should've killed him, by breaking a bottle over his head during treatment.
That way I would have saved the world.
After 6 years in a secret KGB prison,
there followed an absurd indictment and a sentence with no trial.
A month earlier, Stalin’s protegé Viktor Abakumov,
the former head of SMERSH and minister for state security,
had fallen into disgrace and was dismissed from office.
In 1951, when Abakumov was arrested,
it was discovered that a number of Germans who witnessed Hitler's death,
were being held without a warrant for their arrest.
So a list was drawn up and sent to Stalin for further instructions.
He decided they were to be sentenced.
Everyone on the list was given a long sentence for imaginary political crimes.
That way, nobody could speak about what they had seen.
I was sentenced to 10 years in a forced-labor camp in Siberia,
with the 6.5 years solitary already served taken into account.
I signed.
I was happy to go to a camp with fellow sufferers and escape my stone tomb in Moscow.
In December 1951, Käthe left Moscow for Siberia in a cattle wagon.
She was given her little suitcase of summer dresses,
packed in Berlin 6.5 years previous when she thought she'd be away for a week.
The journey lasted 14 days and Käthe recalled that when one of the prisoners died,
the guards threw the body out into the snow.
She wrote that she had to do an extreme amount of labor.
I couldn't keep up. At the time I weighed under 40 kilos.
Because I did not work enough, my food ration was cut.
No breakfast, no food in the evening, just at midday.
If a fellow prisoner hadn’t helped me, I would have certainly starved to death.
Käthe Heusermann was sentenced because she could testify that Hitler was dead.
She was imprisoned in the Soviet Union so that nobody would find out
those in power had falsified historical facts.
She suffered because of her services to history.
First, a secret prisoner then sentenced for a made-up crime,
Käthe was first released after ten years in 1955. Her situation changed completely.
We arrived in Moscow on June 1st and they took us around the city by bus.
They showed us the Kremlin, the university,
and the underground stations which were each individually decorated,
with mosaics, paintings, and marble.
Käthe returned to Germany in an express train with sleeping cars,
white curtains and lampshades.
In the Soviet Union, tourists had to spend all their rubles before leaving the country.
The men often invested their little money in Crimean champagne or vodka
from the dining car and gave the rest as tips.
For eight years, Käthe's family knew nothing of what had become of her.
Until a recently released prisoner said that she was alive and in a prison camp in Siberia.
Käthe’s husband, who had returned from the front,
had had her declared dead and remarried.
But she immediately adapted to her new existence.
Surprisingly she said that chapter of my life is over. Now I'm starting a new life.
I am not a woman with an absent husband, am I? I have no idea who I am.
What are you when you have been declared dead? Dead? I don't know what to call that.
That is how it was.
20 years after the end of WW II, Elena's book was finally published in Moscow.
But first, it had to pass two censors.
The first was the normal one that every book in the Soviet Union was subject to.
The second check was carried out by the KGB.
It forbade her from saying she had access to their secret archives.
So from a historical point of view, the work was basically worthless.
The author was not allowed to base her writing on findings or concrete sources.
She was also banned from mentioning official lies or divulging state secrets.
She would have to wait another 25 years to do that.
In 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.
Outside the Lubyanka building, the KGB headquarters,
the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the KGB’s predecessor was removed.
Was it now finally possible to tell the whole story?
When I became director of the State Archives in 1992,
there was a kind of handover of power.
My predecessor handed me a box that contained parts of Hitler's skull
and documents on the investigation into his death.
It was only after the fall of the Soviet Union
that we could launch what is known as The Archive Revolution.
Millions of documents were declassified so that researchers could access them.
The findings, material evidence, as well as parts of Hitler's skull,
had been kept in the state archives, while the archives of the KGB, now the FSB,
had kept part of the witness reports, including that of Käthe Heusermann,
as well as the main proof, Hitler's teeth under lock and key.
But where were the bodies? The charred remains of Hitler and Eva Braun?
The remains were handed over to the Chief of Staff of the third army,
stationed in East Germany.
Every time the army was relocated they took them with them.
They had to dig them up and bury them in a new secret hiding place.
In 1970, the then KGB chief Yuri Andropov advised Leonid Brezhnev
to get rid of the charred remains that had followed the third army for 25 years.
The secret document about the destruction of the Nazi leaders' remains
was discovered in the archives in 1992 and the case was closed.
47 years later, all the evidence of Hitler's gunshot suicide
in his bunker on April 30, 1945, was finally made public.
Nothing remains secret. Everything comes out in the end. History teaches us that.
Even the best-kept secret comes out in the end.
The governments that followed never felt it necessary to explain themselves.
In the 90s, Russian leaders said:
OK, there were secrets, but it was the work of the Soviet Union.
They should have issued a general verdict on the Soviet era and the Soviet regime
as an instrument of power based on violence that violated its own laws.
But that judgment of the past and Soviet crimes never happened.
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