| 
Adolf Hitler was as mythical in death as he was brutal and large in life. Because of the curious circumstances of his suicide, and the inability of the wartime Allied powers to cooperate on an extensive and thorough proof that he did die, a whole mythos of his survival grew up after the war, and continued for ever since. Betrayed even by Heinrich Himmler himself, who had secretly begun peace negotiations with the western Allies through the Swedish government, and with one time designated "Deputy Führer" and former party chief Rudolf Hess in a British prison cell, and his designated replacement Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring claiming leadership in the chaos of the collapsing Reich to the quick denunciation by Hitler for treason. The Führer relinquished power before his suicide to an unlikely candidate, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who for a brief period of little more than a week, was Nazi Germany's second dictator before he ordered its armed forces to surrender. The selection of Dönitz by Hitler is significant, for Dönitz was in an usual position to coordinate the escape of fleeing Nazis to South America and other places via the new type XXI U-boats just entering service.
It is worth looking at the Hitler and various other Nazi survival myths in a broad overview, in order to have a basis on which to distinguish possible fact from deliberate myth and misinformation. For these various Nazi survival myths and legends, Hitler's survival is not so much a fact, as a grotesque parody of an icon, a disturbing possibility that hovers over every version. For example, the standard view of Hitler committing suicide on April 30, 1945, is itself not without its own occult significance, for this is the date of the eve of a "Witches' Sabbath," the Walpurgisnacht. Moreover, in mediaeval Cathar doctrine - a doctrine well-studied by the SS Ahnenerbe - suicide was a permissible act, if done in concert with another, with a soul mate. Hitler and his newly married mistress of many years, Eva (Braun) Hitler, both committed suicide together.
| Hitler's personal devotion to occult principles was proven ultimately by his self-inflicted death. His choice of April 30 for his suicide may well have been meant as a sacrifice; it was the eve of Beltane (known in Germany as Walpurgisnacht), identified on popular Wiccan websites as a Druid feast in honor of the deity Bel. In witchcraft, this "power-point" day is regarded as a "great sabbat" equal in potency to Halloween. According to Wiccans, Bel is derived from the Canaanite Baal; but Helena Blavatsky goes farther in "The Secret Doctrine" (vol.2), reconstructing an astrological trinity of Bel/Baal (sun-god, father), Christos (Mercury, son) and Lucifer (Venus, holy spirit). As for Hitler's suicide itself, this was not a cowardly act from an occultist viewpoint, but rather an honorable practice known among the Druids, as well as among the Cathari "Perfects", those medieval guardians of the Grail, who called it the rite of "Endura". A curious requirement of the "Endura" was that it was always to be done by pairs of intimate friends, a detail known by the Nazis which makes sense of Hitler's joint suicide with his new wife Eva Braun. Incidentally, Hitler's associates Karl Haushofer and Göbbels also killed themselves in ceremonial fashion along with their wives.
| | According to SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Möhnke, commandant of the Reichs Chancellery defence, Hitler had wanted to survive until May 5 before committing suicide, so that he could symbolically die on the same day as Napoleon Bonaparte, who he admired. However, Möhnke told Hitler that it was unlikely that Berlin could hold out that long. Moreover, Möhnke warned Hitler that May 1, being May Day, was a day of symbolic importance for the Soviets, and that he expected the final Russian push to come then. This remark apparently caused Hitler to choose April 30 as his suicide date, before May Day.
| The non-standard Hitler and Nazi survival myths run the whole spectrum, from fanciful and implausible stories of underground bases in the Canadian Arctic, or on Antarctica itself armed with exotic weaponry, to more "mundane" and plausible stories of Nazi colonies in South America or secret weather stations and commando teams operating in Greenland during the war, to the well-known and best documented case, that of Operation Paperclip, America's wholesale importation of Nazi scientists and doctors after World War Two to assist the United States in continued covert development and research on a whole host of black projects. In one rather interesting version of the Hitler survival myth, he and other Nazi bigwigs underwent plastic surgery before the end of the war, and were spirited off to Antarctica or South America.
|
According to a 1997 report by Sean David Morton, a female Nazi Intelligence Officer named Magda Zeitfeld offered her services to the United States Government. She worked in Berchtesgaden, and was apparently one of Germany's top intelligence agents. She had been sending the Allies information since the spring of 1944, acting as a double agent, because the SS she worked for had murdered her father and brother, under very mysterious circumstances.
Her father had the biggest plastic surgery clinic in Berlin. He was a pioneer in the field, and well financed by the Nazis, due to their obsession with physical perfection, and was doing a landmark business. He pioneered and specialized in implanted facial prosthetics, using highly advanced silicates to build up weak jaws and noses to fit the German fashion of chiseled strength. Three men, exceptionally high level Nazi officials, were brought to her father's clinic under a veil of extreme security and secrecy in the fall of 1943. Her father and brother were required to drastically alter the appearance of each of the men. Two weeks after the men left her family's clinic, and sufficient time had passed to be sure there was no need to go back for follow up treatment, the hospital was raided and the entire staff, including both Magda's father and brother, were brutally murdered, and the clinic was burned to the ground, files and all. Magda knew that it was the Nazis who had done this, in fact it was a division within the SS for whom she worked. According to the report, two of the men were Martin Borman and Adolf Hitler. That Hitler did undergo some sort of cosmetic surgery was independently confirmed in a well-known 1942 Time magazine article about the Nazi leader. His plastic surgery was also referred to by United Press Central European manager Frederick C. Oechsner, and in the Office of Strategic Services' Hitler Source Book. The story broke when some journalists began to notice a strange alteration in Adolf Hitler's physical appearance, especially his nose. The SS immediately released an official press dispatch stating that Hitler had his fat nose streamlined by a plastic surgeon. That did not, however, explain why the originally thin, straight nose of Corporal Hitler gave way to the large, exaggerated nostrils of the Führer.
DID HITLER FLEE IN JUNE 1944?
Sir Alan Lascelles was King George VI's private secretary from 1943-52.
Lascelles, in his diaries, entitled King's Counsellor, wrote that, in June 1944, General Georges Catroux, of the Free French forces, had asked the British government's Alfred Duff Cooper "to see a certain French officer, urgently."
The diary entry for 21 June 1944 continues:
This man, who is a very big noise in the French intelligence service, told Duff that he had very reliable information that Hitler had fled from Berlin to a villa near Perpignan, where he is now hiding and waiting a favourable opportunity to slip across the Spanish frontier.
.
By 1944, Hitler no longer appeared in public.
Why might Hitler have wanted to leave Germany in 1944?
According to Lascelles, Germany talked of peace terms as early as 1943.
In his diary entry for 27 December 1943, Lascelles wrote:
Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen telegraphed yesterday from Ankara that Numan (Turkish Foreign Minister) had told him ... that the German Minister in Bucharest had called (in uniform) on the Romanian Foreign Minister, and told him Germany would accept peace on the following terms: they would surrender fleet, submarines, merchant fleet, air force, disarm completely, evacuate all occupied territory, undertake never to ask for colonies, and leave Europe to be organised according to the wishes of the Allies.
The only condition they asked for is economic freedom for Germany, but this is to be arranged as found suitable by the Allies.
Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on unconditional surrender.
And this worked to the advantage of Russia, which ended up controlling Eastern Europe.
In 1943, sections of the German military showed signs of wanting rid of Hitler.
Between 1943 and March 1944 there were seven plots against Hitler.
The 20th July 1944 plot failed to kill Hitler, or his 'double'.
Journalist Abel Basti says Hitler escaped from Spain by submarine into exile in South America.
He claims to have a document showing the FBI searched for the Hitler in Spain in 1947.
If Hitler fled from Berlin in June 1944, then who was acting as his 'double' back in Germany, up until April 1945, when Hitler supposedly died.
According to Time Magazine, in 1935:
Adolf Hitler last week became the first Dictator frankly to employ a double
Impersonating the Realmleader, a pudgy-fingered, smudge-mustached person officially opened the new motor highway from Holzkirchen to Munich.
Suddenly the crowd recognized Dictator Hitler standing unobtrusively a few yards from his double and good-natured German cheers were given first for one, then for the other.
In November 1944, the Daily Express published photos of Hitler 'past' and 'present', suggesting that the 'present' Hitler was not the real Hitler.
The Express pointed out that the ears on the 'present' Hitler were different from the ears on the 'past' Hitler.
The Daily Express, according to Sir Alan Lascelles in his diary entry of 23 November 1944, "proves fairly conclusively" that the man in the recent photos "cannot be the real Hitler."
Did Adolf Hitler really commit suicide in bunker in Berlin on the day of fall of Third Reich? We are told Soviet troops found Hitler's body buried somewhere in Berlin. Anyone saw it? Anyone checked its DNA? Wasn't it a corpse of Hitler's double? (Hitler had a double of a close resemblance as witnessed by Angel Velasco.)
| One version of this myth even has an elderly Hitler ministering to the poor as a Catholic priest! There is some truth to some of these Nazi survival myths, and that all need to be viewed against the backdrop of the Nazis' own plans for postwar survival and continuance under a variety of fronts, organizations, or in concert with new "host" governments such as the United States or the various governments of Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.
In examining the more audacious survival myths, what emerges is a disturbing picture that suggests deliberate Nazi misinformation in the immediate postwar period, and a deliberate attempt to disguise ongoing projects inside the black projects of the new "host" governments and corporations.
| |
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Happy Führertodestag
Sixty one years ago today, at about three-thirty in the afternoon of Monday, April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler and his wife of less than two days, Eva Braun, committed suicide in Hitler's private suite in the Führerbunker. A half hour later the other inhabitants of the bunker entered the suite to check if Hitler was really dead. While his doctor checked the two bodies, Hitler's valet tidied up a spill made when Eva knocked over a vase full of cut flowers in her death throes. The group wrapped the two bodies in wool blankets and carried them up to the Chancellery courtyard for disposal. On the way out, the group was met by Hitler's chauffeur, Erich Kempka, who was returning from a scavenging expedition to find enough gas to cremate the bodies. He had been able to find something less than 200 liters, which was more than enough for the task. The group placed the bodies in a ditch, drenched them in gas, and, after a few false starts, set them on fire. This private cremation was in accordance with Hitler's last wishes. He had left explicit instructions that his body be completely destroyed and that the only witnesses be his innermost, trusted circle of associates. They failed him on both accounts. The private ceremony, conducted under artillery fire from the Russian army only a few blocks away, was witnessed by at least two German soldiers on patrol in the Chancellery buildings that surrounded the courtyard. Although the fire burned for nearly eight hours, with no one to tend it, it failed to completely destroy the bodies. It's very difficult to rapidly destroy a body. We can only speculate about Hitler's motives in ordering his body to be disposed of in such a manner. While he may have been concerned about denying his enemies -especially Stalin- a ghoulish trophy, his main objective was probably pure mischief. He wanted to leave his enemies in confusion, fearing his return, each suspecting the other of knowing more than they were telling. In this, he was a tremendous success. Hitler had already been close to invisible for nine months when the siege of Berlin began. He had ceased to make public appearances or announce his movements after the July 1944 assassination attempt. Western newspapers had speculated all winter whether or not he was still alive. As the siege of Berlin began, Göbbels had announced that the Führer was still in the city leading the defense against the advancing Bolshevik hordes. Although this was true, the Western press had good reason to distrust anything that came from Göbbels. Although his announcement was printed in Western newspapers, so were rumors of assassinations, insanity, and terminal disease for the Führer. Five days before his suicide, Pravda began suggesting that Hitler was not in the city, but had escaped to Bavaria to make a last stand in the mountains and may have left a double to die in his place. This was an act of insurance on the part of the Soviets. If Hitler had never been in the city, they were in the clear for not capturing him and it was the fault of the western Allies for not catching him since they told us where to find him. If he escaped, it was our responsibility to close the gap as they chased him toward us. The announcement may also have reflected an element of jealousy on the part of Stalin who did not want his generals to appear too heroic and challenging to his own popularity. As it was, Hitler was still in the city and alive until afternoon of April 30. His political will divided his powers between three of his associates. Admiral Karl Dönitz was appointed President of the Reich and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, Josef Göbbels became Chancellor, and Martin Bormann became the head of the Nazi Party. According to the German constitution, the President should have been elected and he should have named the Chancellor. The lack of better known names like Göring and Himmler, is explained by some last minute back-stabbing by Bormann, who used his presense at the bunker to eliminate rivals for influence. Göbbels was also at the bunker and managed to protect his own position. After setting fire to the bodies the Hitlers, Göbbels telegraphed Admiral Dönitz to inform him of his new position.
|
The doubt existing as to the date when Hitler's life ended is legitimately raised on the basis of protocol and the primary documents.
Academic historians prefer to gloss over the problem by postulating a supposed emotional upheaval in the Berlin bunker on the afternoon of April 30, but this seems too easy a solution.
When Soviet forces examined the bunker and tested the bunker telephone system, they got a dialling tone. Communications to and from the bunker by spoken word remained excellent to the very end.
Here is the problem. Hitler supposedly committed suicide just after three on the afternoon of April 30, 1945. On the night of April 30, Bormann sent a signal to Dönitz which stated:
The Führer has appointed you, Herr Grossadmiral, as his successor. Confirmation in writing follows.
This statement was inaccurate. The Führer combined in his person the offices of Reich Chancellor and Reich President, and by Hitler's Last Will and Testament, Dönitz was to be Reich President only.
If Adolf Hitler was truly dead on the afternoon of 30 April 1945, Dönitz was already Reich President, a fact which Bormann kept secret from him. Göbbels was already Reich Chancellor by virtue of Hitler's Last Will and Testament, but Dönitz thought that he, Dönitz, was going to be Reich Chancellor and Reich President in personal union because he had been told by Bormann that he had been nominated Hitler's successor. This nonsensical situation regarding who was in charge of Germany on the afternoon of April 30, 1945 indicates an attempt to conceal the identity of the man who was.
The only conceivable reason that Bormann would have for refraining to inform Dönitz in his signal, late on April 30, 1945, that Hitler was dead, that Dönitz was Reich President and Göbbels was Reich Chancellor, was that Hitler's Last Will and Testament was not yet in force BECAUSE HITLER WAS NOT YET DEAD.
By inference, Hitler did not vacate the office of Führer, either by committing suicide or leaving the jurisdiction of the Reich for exile, until May 1, 1945.
Hitler's precipitate decision to marry Eva Braun is unlikely to have been made for a reason not connected with State protocol. The probability is that they married in haste because it was a condition of some agreement. There are a number of possibilities but the most likely case is that the Church of Rome insisted on the mariage as a precondition for its help in arranging sanctuary and later exile.
| Around midnight, as the cremation fires were dying, General Hans Krebs left the bunker and began crawling through the rubble of the city toward the Russian army headquarters. The trip of a few blocks took hours and it was almost sunrise when he arrived and escorted into the presence of General Vasily Chuikov. Krebs described the events of the previous day and said he was authorized by Chancellor Göbbels to negotiate a cease-fire. Chuikov had an aide get on the phone with the head of the Soviet army, Marshall Grigory Zhukov, and Zhukov had an aide get on the phone with Stalin. This means Stalin definitely had news of Hitler's death on the morning of May 1. The Russians refused Krebs' cease-fire offer and escorted him back to the bunker around noon. After reporting, Krebs and two other army officers proceeded to get roaring drunk, sing American sea shanties, and kill themselves. After dinner, Magda Göbbels, the wife of the new Chancellor, poisoned six of her children. Then she and her husband dressed as if stepping out for the evening, climbed up to the courtyard, and killed themselves.
Defence of the Reichstag, Berlin
On the 30th April, Unterscharführer Georg Diers and his crew of tank 314, were ordered to take up a defensive position at the Reichstag buildings. This was one of only two remaining King Tigers belonging to Heavy SS Tank Battalion 503 in Berlin. By that evening they had knocked out about 30 T34's, and the following day led a successful counterattack against the Kroll Opera House directly opposite the Reichstag.
Their efforts though, merely postponed the inevitable and by the end of the day
the order was given to abandon the position and prepare to break out of Berlin. At 9:40 that evening, Admiral Dönitz - now President Dönitz - addressed the German people from a Hamburg radio station. In introducing the new president, the announcer said, "It is reported from the Führer's headquarters that our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational command post at the Reich Chancellery." There are at least three lies in that sentence. Hitler died the day before, not that afternoon. Hitler did not die in battle. There was no fighting at the Chancellery that day because the main thrust of the Soviet forces that day was the Reichstag complex a few blocks north (a battle that climaxed with a flag-raising image that is the Soviet's equivalent to our Iwo Jima photograph).
For the Soviets, the Reichstag was the symbol of the Third Reich (ironically, never restored by the Nazis after the Reichstag fire) and one that they wanted to capture before the May Day parade in Moscow.
At 10.40 pm on April 30, 1945 a Soviet victory flag was raised over the German Reichstag building in Berlin. It was not a real flag but a large piece of red cloth. The soldier who performed this act was Private Mikhail Petrovich Minin of the Soviet 3rd Army.
There was no camera-man present.
The Soviet propaganda photograph we see today was actually taken later on the 2nd of May. It shows a Georgian soldier, Meliton Kantaria, posing for the propaganda picture. This soldier had taken no part in the storming of the Reichstag.
On the morning of 2 May the Soviets stormed the Reich Chancellery. In the official Soviet version, the battle was similar to that of the battle for the Reichstag, but the official Soviet description is probably an exaggeration, because as most of the German combat troops had left in the breakouts the night before, the resistance must have been far less than that inside the Reichstag. Major Anna Nikulina of Lieutenant-General Rossly's 9th Rifle Corps of the 5th Shock Army commanded the assault group which unfurled the red flag on the roof.
| The remaining inhabitants of the bunker, including Martin Bormann, divided into two groups and made a break for freedom at around midnight. Most were killed or captured by the Russians in the attempt. The last person in the bunker was Johannes Hentschel, a lowly mechanic who had dutifully kept the ventilation, electricity, and water running during the previous dramatic days. At one point, he had climbed up to the Chancellery greenhouse and gathered up enough garden hoses to run a water line from the bunker's private well to an army field hospital that had been set up in offices on the far side of the Chancellery building. By keeping the water running he may have saved the lives of over three hundred wounded soldiers. Now, he stayed on to watch his machinery. Towards dawn, he returned to the ruins of the greenhouse and cut several bouquets of tulips and lilacs, which he placed around the bunker to freshen the stale air. He fixed a large breakfast and did the dishes. With his duties complete, he waited for the Russians to arrive. Mechanic Hentschel didn't have long to wait. While making his rounds at a few minutes after nine on the morning of May 2, he heard foreign voices in the upper bunker and prepared to surrender. The first Russians into the bunker were a group of women medical officers on a looting expedition. They had no interest in prisoners and left Hentschel in the hallway while they went into the inner bunker to dig through Eva Braun's closets. A few minutes later, two commissars with drawn pistols arrived. Hentschel prepared to surrender again, and could easily have been shot on the spot, except for the fact that the doctors chose that moment to rush up the stairs, giggling and waving Eva's frilly underwear over their heads. The commissars listened to Hentschel's story of the Führer's end. Another, larger, group of officers had arrived by now and had discovered the liquor supply. They handed Hentschel a mug of champagne and toasted the end of the war. Other arriving groups insisted on Hentschel repeating his story and giving tours of the bunker, but they let him take a short nap before sending him off as a POW. Hentschel was already gone when the first team arrived in the afternoon to hunt for Hitler's body. This team recovered the Göbbels' bodies and left. A second team found a bloated body in a water tank that had correct moustache and immediately declared it to be Hitler. The next day, a private found the charred bodies of a man, woman and two dogs hastily buried in a shell crater in the garden. This fact was duly noted by the inspectors, but it was two more days before they combined that fact with the stories of Hentschel and Krebs and thought to examine them. The following week, the Soviet inspectors located a dental assistant who had worked on Hitler's teeth the previous winter. Showing her a cigar box full of jaw fragments, she correctly identified both Hitler and Braun. By mid-May the Soviets had eyewitness accounts of Hitler's death, the physical remains of his body, and a positive identification of those remains. They should have been able to make a positive announcement that the monster was dead, thanks to the work of the Soviet army who backed him into a corner from which he could not escape. They didn't do that. The Soviet news agencies were would remain contactory and unhelpful for weeks after the fall of Berlin. Because they controlled the actual site and had captured most of the surviving witnesses, the Western news media were in no better shape after Hitler's death than before. They had only rumor and speculation to give their readers. The Atlanta Constitution demostrated the dilemma of the Western press by reporting Dönitz's announcement of Hitler's death under the headline "If Hitler is Dead, Good Riddance." When honest facts emerged, there was no way to tell them apart from fantasy and they vanished into the white noise. On May 2, even as the first investigators were searching through the Chancellery grounds, Tass declared the announcement from Dönitz to be a trick. That same day, Eisenhower told reporters that Himmler, while attempting to negotiate a truce through Swedish intermediaries a week earlier had claimed Hitler was terminally ill. The next day, the official Soviet announcement of the surrender of the last German troops in Berlin mentioned witnesses talking about his suicide. At the same time, German radio in the enclave under Dönitz's control continued to claim Hitler had died a hero's death in battle. In the space of a week, alert news watchers were offered three different causes of death and two dates of death, as well as well-grounded speculation that Hitler might have escaped. The Soviets continued to be difficult. They refused to allow Westerners into Berlin even after the surrender of Dönitz's government and the last armies in the field on May 7-9. On May 10, they announced the existence of the burned bodies in the Chancellory courtyard, but only allowed that one might be Hitler. The same report went on to say that his body might never be found. On June 6, a spokesman for the Soviet army in Berlin announced unequivocally that Hitler had committed suicide and that his body had been identified. Three days later, Marshall Zhukov, the head of the Soviet army gave a press conference with Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinski looking over his shoulder. "We did not identify the body of Hitler," he said. "I can say nothing definite about his fate. He could have flown away from Berlin at the very last moment." Stalin, by now, had discovered that a live Hitler might be useful to him. The possibility of a return of Hitler justified a harsh occupation and division of Germany. The same possibility required keeping tight control on Eastern Europe; only the Soviet big brother could protect them from a resurgent Germany should Hitler return. The possibility that Hitler might be hiding in Spain was an excuse to demand the Western Allies treat the Franco regime roughly. At one point, he even insisted that Britain and the US invade Spain just to make sure Hitler wasn't there. The suggestion that the Soviet army had allowed Hitler to escape, allowed Stalin to treat the generals with contempt and hide them from the public eye. This doesn't mean that the confusion was a carefully coordinated plot on the part of the Soviet government. Although they were in possession of all of the relevant facts about Hitler's death, there is no evidence that the people at the top put two and two together, or believed it when they did. Although they were perfectly capable of an evil conspiracy, the Soviet leadership assumed others were equally as deceptive and expected to find lies when they looked for facts. In addition, the Soviet government was one of the world's biggest bureaucracies. The poiltburo did not always know what the army was saying and the army did not always know what the propaganda branch was up to. Although all were trying to please Stalin, the boss did not always make his wishes clearly known. Chaos and uncertainty are the normal condition in a totalitarian state. Secrecy breeds suspicion and, where there is a lack of information, the vacuum will be filled with rumor, speculation, and conspiracy theories. Hitler did all he could to encourage this in his last days. As he died, the victors in the war did a superb job of taking over the burden of creating confusion, whether they intended to or not. Once the conspiracy theory genie has been let out of the bottle, it is almost impossible to return it. By June, the veil of secrecy that the Soviets had kept on Berlin had created a darkness too complete to be pierced by facts. They had given permission for the wildest imaginations to run free. Every story about Hitler's doubles and every sighting of the Führer, no matter how remote, was given straight-faced coverage by supposedly serious news outlets. The possibility that the Führer had escaped led numerous die-hard Nazis to brag about their part in helping him escape. Lieut. Arthur Mackensen told how he had flown Hitler from the Tiergarten park on May 5 to Denmark, where the local Nazis held a mass rally to say farewell before the Führer had departed for parts unknown. Others flew him to Spain or Japan or saw him board a U-boat for South America. The last suggestion generated a flurry of excitement as the last U-boats at sea began surrendering during the summer. When the submarine U-530 surrendered to the Argentine authorities in early July, a Buenos Aires paper reported that the captain had delivered Hitler and Braun to a secret base in Antarctica before returning to South America to surrender. The same story was reported and embellished by the Chicago Times the following day. With Hitler's delivery to Antarctica, the escape stories moved from the realm of the probable into the realm of the fantastic and spawned a whole sub-genre of conspiracy literature.
Copyright 2003-2006 John J. McKay. Use what you want, but give credit where credit is due.
|
|
Hitler's ghost was roaming about Europe until 1970
Pravda May 7, 2005 Alisa Argunova
Hitler's ghost was roaming about Europe until 1970. His mortal remains were reburied 8 times and eventually destroyed by fire Adolf Hitler put down his own funeral arrangements back in 1938 as he dreamt of the world domination and his worldwide glory. He wished to be laid to rest in the city of Linz, in a giant burial vault of the National Socialist Party. A golden sepulcher decorated with gems from the Ural Mountains should have been installed in the center of the vault. A badly charred corpse of Hitler was found in a bomb crater in the Imperial Chancellery's garden 60 years ago. His mortal remains were reburied 8 times and eventually destroyed by fire. The first burial took place on April 30, 1945. The Führer, his newly-fledged wife Eva Braun, and his two dogs were buried in the garden of the Imperial Chancellery. A Russian soldier Ivan Churakov found two unidentified corpses in a crater on May 4th. The Russians removed the remains but put them back into the ground on the same day because Hitler's body was thought to have been already found. On May 5th the remains were dug out and moved to a clinic in the town of Buch. The medical examination of the remains took place on May 8th. The remains were interred for the 4th time in a town of Finov, to which the department of SMERSH (Russian acronym for "Death to the spies", a counterintelligence branch of the Soviet military intelligence during WWII) of the 3rd Soviet Army was re-deployed. The remains were inhumed for the 5th time on May 17th following data re-examination conducted by General Meshik who arrived from Moscow. The report on data re-examination and the jaws allegedly belonging to Hitler and Braun were hand-carried by the general to Moscow. And the remains were laid into the ground two more times after the army headquarters changed locations. Finally, the caskets containing the remains were laid in the grave in Magdeburg. The caskets were put into the ground near the house No 36 in Westendstrasse. That is where Hitler's remains were eventually annihilated on April 5, 1970. The remains were destroyed by fire, reduced to aches, mixed with charcoal, and thrown into the river Bideritz. There were a lot of problems arising from identification of Hitler's remains from the very beginning. The witnesses' accounts varied, and witnesses were hard to find. The Soviet military intelligence personnel were combing Berlin and the surrounding areas in their efforts to find witnesses. Josef Stalin was advised of Hitler's demise by Marshal Georgi Zhukov when sent a report to the Soviet leader on May 1, 1945. According to the report, Adolf Hitler was said to have committed suicide on April 30th at 15.50 local time. The SMERSH department of the 3rd Soviet army played a special role in the search for Hitler's remains. Colonel Vasily Garbushin, deputy chief of SMERSH department, was reported to have been personally instructed by Colonel General Ivan Serov, deputy commander of the 1st Belarussian Front, to launch a search operation and locate the corpse of Hitler. Soviet soldiers removed two badly charred bodies from a crater in the Imperial Chancellery's garden on May 4th. But the bodies of a man and a woman were soon put back into the ground because the officers of the 3rd army were for some reason convinced that Hitler's corpse had been already found and was undergoing identification at that point of time. It is evident that some previously found mortal remains were not the body of Hitler and the search went on. The SMERSH personnel headed by Ivan Klimenko went back to the garden on an early morning on May 5th. The two bodies were again removed from the crater. A commission was set up to conduct forensic study including an autopsy of the dead bodies "presumed to be Hitler and his wife." But the bodies were charred almost beyond recognition, therefore, identification was impossible unless additional data were available. Another SMERSH group managed to capture Käthe Hausermann who was an assistant to the Führer's personal dentist. She helped to locate X-ray pictures and dental records of the Nazi leadership. The assistant identified the golden dentures worn by Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. The identification examination was carried out on May 8, 1945. There is an amazing discrepancy in the report of identification. The document says that the examination was conducted by order of Comrade Telegin, a member of the Military Council of the 1st Byelorussian Front dated May 3, 1945. However, the corpse of Hitler was reportedly found either on May 5th or May 4th. There were lots of rumors circulating in Berlin those days about Hitler's doubles and his miraculous escape to Argentina or Spain by plain or submarine. Marshal Zhukov fueled the controversy when he said on a press conference held on June 10, 1945:
We do not have any mortal remains that have been identified as a corpse of Hitler, I can not tell you anything regarding his destiny.
Years later in Moscow, Elena Rzhevskaya, an interpreter with one of the SMERSH key units involved in the hunt for Hitler's remains, told Marshal Zhukov about the discovery of Hitler's body.
|
Secret evidence of Hitler's identity
The Observer
London, Sunday, May 8, 2005
IN the smouldering ruins of Berlin, Elena Rzhevskaya stooped by a radio to hear the announcement of the Nazis' final capitulation, a small box clutched to her side. It was 8 May 1945 and at Karlshorst, on the edge of the city, the German high command had surrendered to Russian, British and American forces.
But the young interpreter from Soviet military reconnaissance was subdued as her comrades across the city broke into wild celebrations.
Tucked in the satin-lined box she was clutching were the flesh-specked jawbones of Adolf Hitler, wrenched from his corpse just hours earlier by a Russian pathologist.
A burnt body thought to be the Führer's had been found by a Red Army soldier near his bunker days before, but Josef Stalin ordered the discovery be concealed.
"Only two officers knew what I was carrying and I had to keep my tongue," Rzhevskaya (85) told The Observer in a rare interview at her Moscow apartment.
Hitler's teeth would be key to proving the corpse was his and only a select few knew what had been entrusted to Rzhevskaya.
It was not until the 1960s that her secret would be revealed, and the full truth only emerged in Russia a decade ago.
Her story is a telling reminder of the jealousy and rivalries that split the Allies even in their hour of victory, and foreshadowed the Cold War.
On 8 May, as Soviet soldiers in Berlin's streets shouted with joy at the news of German surrender, Rzhevskaya poured wine for her colleagues with one hand -- while clamping the little box to her side with the other.
Can you imagine how it felt? A young woman like me who had travelled the long military road from the edge of Moscow to Berlin; to stand there and hear that announcement of surrender, knowing that I held in my hands the decisive proof that we had Hitler's remains.
For me it was a moment of immense solemnity and emotion; it was victory. Rzhevskaya was ordered to carry the bones by Colonel Vassily Gorbushin, the head of a tiny secretive Soviet team tasked with identifying the remains.
Soviet troops were obsessed with finding Hitler and competing groups roved around hunting for him.
A Red Army soldier spotted the edge of a blanket poking from freshly turned earth in a bomb crater, near the bunker.
Adolf and Eva Hitler's bodies were soon unearthed and forensic experts were delighted to find the Nazi leader's jawbones in perfect condition. "These are the key," said one doctor.
After a brief pause to celebrate VE Day and a frantic search through the ruined city, Rzhevskaya and her two superior officers tracked down an assistant [Käthe Häusermann] to Hitler's dentist [Hugo Blaschke] who was able to confirm his identity.
WELL, perhaps not so secret after all. Elena Rzhevskaya published a book not long after WW2 with the same revelations.
More important is the work of Lev Bezymenski, Der Tod von Adolf Hitler. Bezymenski, a KGB officer (and, like many of them, a Jew) was a fine Intelligence officer, but not such a conscientious historian; he was ordered (he said) by the KGB to conceal in his book the fact that Hitler shot himself, and to make various other propagandistic amendments to the version of the autopsy report which he published as an appendix.
A later edition, post-KGB, rectifies this however.
|
The Allies did not share information on progress regarding the search for Hitler's mortal remains. "Hitler's corpse in not in our possession," said Josef Stalin during the Potsdam conference in July 1945. All information and documents pertaining to Hitler's mortal remains were classified. Those involved in the search were told to keep it dark and they obeyed the orders implicitly since all the personnel were part of the Soviet counterintelligence apparatus. All the documents relating to the investigation were submitted to Josef Stalin for consideration on June 16th, 1945. The Soviet government made no statement on the outcome of the search operation for Adolf Hitler and his henchmen. Perhaps numerous discrepancies in the accounts of the witnesses and examination reports are to blame for the lack of an official statement. The story about the search for Hitler's remains is quite murky. It is not for nothing that a new investigation launched in 1946 had a code name Myth. A special team of NKVD (Soviet government's secret-police organization) was again searching for Hitler in Germany nine months after the above events. They were looking for him dead or alive. The investigators conducted additional excavations on the site where the bodies of Hitler and Braun were discovered. They found a part of the cranium with a bullet hole on the left-side parietal bone. Incidentally, the examination report on the charred mortal remains dated May 8, 1945, says that "a cranium is partially missing." The investigators also discovered some blood stains on the upholstery of a couch in Hitler' bunker where he reportedly shot himself. The cranium and parts of the couch were sent to Moscow. The State Archive of the Russian Federation still keeps those pieces of "material evidence." The jaws of Hitler removed in May 1945 are kept by the FSB archive. Finally, on March 13, 1970, the head of the KGB Yuri Andropov filed a letter for the attention of Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Central Committee. The letter carried a mark saying "very important." A special technique used during the preparation of the letter highlighted its utmost secrecy. The type-written letter contained a few hand-written inserts with regard to the most classified information. The letter said: In February 1946, on the premises of our military camp located in Magdeburg, the KGB's Special Department under the 3rd army carried out a burial of the corpses of Hitler, Eva Braun, Göbbels, Göbbels' wife and their children. In total, 10 corpses were buried. In line with operating expediency complying with the interests of our troops, the above military camp is about to be transferred to the German authorities. Taking into account a possibility of construction or other earthmoving operations on the location that may result in the discovery of the burial site, I hereby suggest that the remains be exhumed and destroyed by incineration. The procedure will be conducted in total secrecy by a team of operatives of the Special Department of the KGB. The procedure will be properly documented, On March 16th, the letter was agreed by Brezhnev, Kosygin, and Podgorny i.e. the top authorities of the Soviet Union at the time, the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, and the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, respectively. The operation for the final destruction of the remains was dubbed Archive. A special team of the KGB operatives followed the instructions with great care and did everything as planned. They dug out the remains in the wee hours of the morning on April 5, 1970. Then they put the bones into the boxes and later that morning conducted "physical destruction" of the remains.
|
|
