For 79 years, the details surrounding Adolf Hitler’s death have been the subject of intense speculation.
Did he take his own life in a bunker of the Reich Chancellery in on 30 April 1945 by shooting himself in the head, as is widely supposed? Or did he follow Eva Braun, whom he had married the previous day, in also swallowing a cyanide capsule? Were their bodies doused in petrol, burned and buried, as eyewitnesses claimed? Or did he survive, fleeing abroad, as Soviet investigators suggested?
While Éric Laurier, head of forensic medicine at Valenciennes hospital in northern France, is hardly the first author to explore these questions, some of his findings certainly rank among the strangest.
Not least among the dazzling array of anomalies and curiosities in the investigation conducted by Soviet forensic experts, which Laurier analyses in his new book Le Cadavre d’Hitler, is the revelation that one of the 13 bodies discovered in the bunker was ruled out as Hitler’s because of a sock.
The Soviets concluded that, since the sock was darned, and the Nazi dictator would never wear such a shoddy item of clothing, the body could not be Hitler’s.
‘Neglecting to properly examine a corpse on the grounds of a small detail of clothing shows the Red Army’s fanciful approach to selecting the bodies for examination,’ Laurier told the Times.
It is just one example, Laurier contends, of the extent to which the Soviet investigation was influenced by political considerations in a climate where scientific fact became subservient to Stalinist propaganda.
By claiming that the Führer may have escaped to Spain or Argentina, Stalin redirected the world’s gaze away from a bungled and contradictory account of Hitler’s last days and instead threw doubt on the claims of Britain and other countries that he had died in Berlin.
Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun, whom he finally married after 14 years in his bunker beneath Berlin – the day before they both died
The final moments of Hitler and Braun, seen here dining together, have long been the subject of intense speculation among researchers and scholars
Hitler, right, is seen during an exchange with his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels during a dinner at the Führerbunker
Such obfuscation lived on long after Stalin’s death in 1953, Laurier believes, with a 1968 Soviet autopsy report that claimed Hitler died from cyanide poisoning shaped by a desire to portray his demise as a craven affair.
Notable in this respect is that Hitler had his dog, Blondi, poisoned the day before his own death in order to test the effectiveness of the cyanide capsules with which the SS had provided him. By claiming that the dictator took cyanide, the Soviets were implying Hitler had died a dog’s death.
‘The remains of those who died in the bunker were numbered from 1 to 13 and those of Hitler and Eva Braun were those numbered 12 and 13,’ said Laurier, the title of whose book translates as Hitler’s Corpse.
‘The Soviets were advancing the hypothesis that Hitler and Braun took cyanide, but they only carried out toxicological examinations that would have proved it on the first 11 corpses, not on the remains of Hitler and Braun.’
In 1993, Russia announced that it had a fragment of Hitler’s skull, which had been pierced with a bullet. However, when researchers from the University of Connecticut analysed the bone in 2009, extracting a DNA sample, they concluded it belonged to a woman – reigniting theories that Hitler had indeed fled. Laurier takes the view that the provenance of the fragment remains unproven.
The obvious question is how such evidence could have survived if – as eyewitnesses claimed when interrogated by Allied officers – his petrol-doused corpse was burned and buried, together with Braun’s, after being taken outside the bunker.
While the Soviets claimed troops dug up the fragments and reburied them in Magdeburg, East Germany, other reports suggested the KGB recovered the skull fragments and conveyed them to Moscow.
Whatever the reality, Laurier’s findings – socks and all – would seem to reaffirm that truth is often stranger than fiction.
