The Death of Hitler: The Final Word

MOSCOW, DECEMBER 2016

It’s impossible to ignore the proximity of Red Square. Christmas garlands and decorations frame a forest of little rectangular chalets singing the praises of Russian popular art. In an uninterrupted torrent, Muscovites in gaudy anoraks slalom among the stalls. Laughing, they hurry down the long pedestrian Nikolskaya Street towards the crimson walls of the Kremlin. The ones most vulnerable to the cold, or the least well covered-up, find an oasis of warmth by passing through one of the grand entrances to Gum, Moscow’s historic commercial centre. You can’t miss this great stone and glass ocean liner of a building opposite Lenin’s mausoleum. The temple to bourgeois hyper-consumption stands in contrast with the grim, dark marble sarcophagus of the master of the Russian Revolution. As if to taunt old Vladimir Ilyich, Gum has even been decked out with a thousand bright lights for the New Year celebrations, and its ostentatious window displays burst with Western luxury goods. A few foreign tourists, happy to test the heat-protecting properties of their fur hats, brave the polar wind. As if amazed by their own resistance to the cold, they take selfie after selfie with their mobile phones on the end of fragile telescopic perches. It’ll soon be Christmas.

Our present is waiting for us at the other end of the tourist quarter.

Here I am back on Russian territory. After a phone call from Lana the previous week, I made my mind up. “It’s okay, she told me, I’ve been given the green light and I’m taking the first flight from Paris to Moscow.” So here we are, Lana and I, bang in the middle, near the Kremlin.

We still don’t know the nature of the present as we pass through the crowds coming in the opposite direction along Nikoskaya Street.

The darkness of the Russian winter days makes the biting cold feel even more intense, even though, at only minus 15 degrees, the temperature is acceptable to a Muscovite. The appearance of cars with blue lights marks the end of the pedestrian section of the street. In front of us is a monumental square of the kind that the Russians are so good at building. At its centre, a snow-covered central island. Then, further off, a building with Italian-inspired orange pastel tones. The rigour of its architecture, stripped of decorative flourishes, gives it an immediately recognisable commanding quality. Lubyanka Square, with the notorious Lubyanka building bounding one side.

Lubyanka equals KGB, KGB equals terror. If the history of the Soviet Union has its shadowy areas, the Lubyanka is definitely its black sun. For decades, Number 2 Bolshaya Lubyanka housed the secret services of the Communist regime, the KGB. Not only its administrative service, which, with a simple stamp, dispatched deportees to the Siberian camps. No, hidden deep within this Lubyanka address are the interrogation rooms and a prison. For generations of Soviets, entering this building amounted to a death sentence, or at least the certainty of disappearing for many years. Some of the most important Nazis, imprisoned after the fall of the Reich, endured their worst torture sessions between these thick walls. Since 11 October 1991, the KGB has ceased to exist, having been partially replaced in 1995 by the FSB which is still based at 2 Bolshaya Lubyanka. That was where we were due to have our meeting. A meeting to try and consult the secret reports into Hitler’s death, the ones that haven’t yet been declassified. Particularly the ones about the discovery of the alleged body of the Führer. More than seventy years after the demise of the Third Reich, the Hitler file is still partly confidential, and comes within the competence of the secret services.

Quite quickly, thanks to our contacts at GARF, the Russian State Archives, we came to learn that one of the keys to the Hitler mystery dwelt at the heart of the FSB. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle scattered by a temperamental child, the pieces of the “H file” have been distributed among different Russian government services. Was it done deliberately so as not to leave such a secret in the hands of a single administration? Or was it just the result of a hidden war between bureaucrats jealous of their archive dossiers? The USSR, and then today’s Russia, have been skilled at creating and maintaining these administrative quarrels, the perfect illustration of a paranoid system. Whatever the truth of the matter, consulting these documents is like a treasure hunt whose rules vary between one contact and another. Stalin would not repudiate such methods. GARF gets the bit of skull that they claim belonged to Hitler, the Russian State Military Archives get the police files of the witnesses of the Führer’s last days, and the TsA FSB have the file about the discovery and authentication of the body. A chaotic spread of resources for anyone hoping for any kind of simplicity in the consultation of documents. People such as historians and journalists. The proliferation of pitfalls and authorities to be persuaded means that the slightest inquiry into the disappearance of the German dictator quickly becomes both infernal and exhausting, in terms of time and money.

It is now three months since we first made our application to the FSB. That was last October. Three months of waiting. Silence. Nothing. And then an answer. “No. Don’t even think about it. Impossible.” Lana knows the Russian mentality well enough not to give up at the first refusal. So she started writing new mails, and then going directly to the offices in question. Persuading people is her major gift. To increase our chances, she approached the media service of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Alexander Orlov is the man who deals with journalists covering stories on Russian territory. He was the one who got me my temporary Russian press card, without which I wouldn’t be able to conduct this investigation. Alexander speaks French and knows about our research into Hitler. He’s bound to have contacts with the FSB. Lana is sure of it and she gets in touch with him. The result is a long time coming, but then there’s a call from Alexander. “Yes. Next week. Wednesday!”

The day before the meeting, when I’ve just booked in at my Moscow hotel, Lana tells me that it’s not going to happen on Wednesday now. It’s all been cancelled. In fact not cancelled, but postponed. Postponed to when? Maybe Thursday. On the phone, Lana negotiates and argues. “He’s come specially from Paris,” she explains to Alexander. “When is the French journalist going home?” he asks. “Ah, Friday! What time flight? 1:30 pm! Then the meeting will be on Friday at 10:00. The person who will see you is called Dmitri. Be on time!”

Apart from the surprise, even the joy, of a positive response, one question eats away at us: why? Why this sudden U-turn by the Russian authorities? Why would the FSB hand over secrets that had been so closely guarded for over seventy years? Why us? Let’s be frank. Lana and I very quickly came to doubt our importance for them. Not because we doubted the seriousness of our project, or the solid foundations of our professional reputation, but that couldn’t be enough.

There had, of course, been Lana’s patient, dogged work on the different bureaucratic wheels of the Russian administration. Not to mention the support, time and again, of her well-placed friends in the spheres of “Putinian” power. That combination seemed perfect when it came to removing obstacles in the way of our researches in the State Archives (GARF). It allowed us to obtain green lights from the relevant services relatively easily. And, above all, the definite permission to consult documents that few researchers, particularly foreign ones, could have got hold of. But the FSB archives are from another world, a closed world. All the more so since Putin took over the country. In the Yeltsin era, in the 1990s, you could get hold of anything if you poured money into it; today that’s impossible. Besides, everyone we met in the course of this investigation told us over and over again: the Hitler file is a Kremlin matter. No decision can be taken without agreement from the top levels of the state, or at least without their knowledge.

The most credible hypothesis we were able to come up with did not work in our favour. It could be summed up in a word: manipulation. What if granting us access to the files on Hitler’s death was useful to Russian state propaganda? Just like in Stalin’s day, immediately after the war, Moscow is suspicious of the West, of Europe, and primarily of the United States. Diplomatic tensions have been mounting between the White House and the Kremlin for a decade, and you don’t have to be a genius to sense the cooling of relations between the Western powers and Russia. And yet our investigation into Hitler is taking place within that tense context. It gives Moscow the opportunity to remind the whole world that it was the Red Army that defeated the Nazis and broke Hitler. The proof being the ultimate trophy of the Second World War: the remains of the Führer’s corpse, in fact a piece of his skull. Producing this evidence today is a reminder that Russia is a great nation, a power that can once again be counted on.

And who better to convey that message than a team of international journalists: Lana is Russian-American, I’m French.

That’s our hypothesis. For want of certainty, it encourages us to remain vigilant.

You might think that the wounds of the Second World War are finally healing as the last actors in that drama succumb to sickness or old age. The last days of the Führerbunker and its inhabitants have been known about for decades. There is no shortage of eyewitness testimonies or reference works. We know who among the inhabitants of Hitler’s shelter was arrested by the Soviets, the British, or indeed the Americans. We know who died, too. The visual proof exists for all of them–except Hitler and Eva Braun.

To prepare for our meeting with the FSB, Lana and I returned to the indisputable facts of the fall of Berlin.

On 2 May 1945, the first Soviet troops attacked the Führerbunker. In Hitler’s apartments, they found some injured people who were too exhausted to flee, and three corpses. These were Generals Krebs and Burgdorf, as well as the head of Hitler’s bodyguards, Franz Schädle. All three had chosen to commit suicide. No trace of Hitler. The previous day, as we saw earlier, an official message signed by Goebbels and Bormann and conveyed to the general staff of the Red Army announced the death of the Führer. Immediately informed, Stalin issued the express order to find his enemy’s body. All the secret services of the Soviet Union and the elite military units were informed of their new mission.

That was how, a few hours after the taking of the Führerbunker, the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels were found, photographed, and filmed. Those were the facts.

Let’s come back to the Goebbels case for a moment. There is no mystery about him. His suicide is confirmed by the existence of numerous documents, and especially photographs and videos. The fanatical master of Nazi propaganda took his own life and dragged his wife and six children with him into his final act of madness. It was 1 May 1945. Having received the order from Goebbels in person, the last SS men in the bunker burnt his corpse and that of Magda, his wife. Then they ran for it in the hope of escaping the Red Army. In their haste, they forgot, or didn’t take the time, to deal with the bodies of the children. Contrary to the plan, they would not be burnt.

The Soviets found the bodies of the Goebbels couple as soon as they entered the shelter. This is the account given in a “Top Secret” NK report by the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat (equivalent to a ministry) for Internal Affairs. It is dated 27 May 1945. It was sent directly to one of the most powerful and feared men in the USSE, the head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria.

The Goebbels children were not found until later. The officer who signed this report, Lieutenant General Aleksandr Vadis, was hard-bitten, a man inured to the horrors of the war of extermination that the Nazis waged against his country. Vadis wasn’t just anyone, in Berlin he led a very secret and very violent unit of SMERSH, the Soviet military counter-espionage service that operated between April 1943 and May 1946. And yet in his report he has difficulty concealing his dismay:

The Russians agreed to pass on this confidential information to the Anglo-American Allies. Goebbels was a considerable trophy for the Kremlin. A trophy that was worth displaying to the whole world. Because there had not been enough petrol and time to take the cremation to its conclusion, Joseph and Magda Goebbels were easily identifiable. The Red Army hurried to broadcast photographs and films of their spoils. The bodies of the children were taken from the room where they had lain and placed in the gardens of the Chancellery near the remains of their parents. The two bodies, blackened by the flames, monstrous piles of flesh, lay next to frail children wearing white pyjamas. They looked as if they had just fallen asleep. The morbid display was horribly effective. The Soviets wanted to appeal to the emotions. Their message to the world was clear: look what the Nazi leaders are capable of! Look at this monstrous regime that we have defeated!

Photographs, films, everything was in place for the accreditation of Goebbels’ death. Certainly, the German Propaganda Minister embodied a large part of the totalitarian insanity of the Nazi regime, and his corpse symbolised the fall of Nazism. Certainly, for a few hours he had been the Chancellor of the Third Reich after the death of Hitler. So why did the Soviets not broadcast similar pictures and publicly exhibit corresponding documents for the keystone of the Nazi regime: the Führer? Even today there is no official visual proof of the charred body of Hitler or his wife.

Are we to believe that the Red Army didn’t take the time to photograph or film the remains of their greatest enemy? If not for the press then at least for Stalin? All the more so since, after the fall of Berlin on 2 May 1945, at the slightest suspicion of the discovery of Hitler’s body, films were shot and photographs taken. In some of these one can see Soviet soldiers proudly presenting a dead man with a small moustache, bearing a vague resemblance to the German dictator. The Russian chiefs of staff wanted to authenticate these “pseudo-Hitlers.” To do so, they asked the Nazi officers they had taken prisoner to identify them. A Soviet diplomat who had met the Führer when he was alive was sent from Moscow to participate in the identifications. In the end the result was negative in every case. Officially, none of the bodies shown was Hitler’s.

Very soon the most outlandish rumours began to circulate. Was the dictator really dead, or had he fled? The stubborn silence of the Soviet authorities only amplified these stories, and unleashed the Hitler mystery.

A mystery that we hope to penetrate in the archives of the FSB seven decades after the fall of Berlin. As long as we are granted permission to authenticate the documents we are allowed to examine. In Russia, trust is a desirable but not obligatory precondition.

It is in this deliberately cautious frame of mind that we walk towards the offices of the TsA FSB. In contrast with the other pavements lining Lubyanka Square, the one that runs along the façade of the Lubyanka remains surprisingly empty. Not a pedestrian in sight. Just two uniformed policemen, truncheons in their hands. Our arrival does not go unnoticed. They watch us out of the corner of their eyes. There are no signs indicating the entrance to the building. With our noses in the air and our hesitant walk, we must look like lost tourists. One of the two cops comes towards us with a cross expression on his face. “Photographs are forbidden on this pavement,” he begins by warning us. “You mustn’t stay here, sensitive area, cameras everywhere,” he goes on, pointing with the end of his truncheon at the many cameras bolted onto the window ledges. Our answer amazes him. We’re there because we want to go in, not take photographs, just go in. “Are you sure?” the policeman says, as if he’s sorry for us. Then he continues, turning up the collar of his thick lined jacket, “That’s the entrance there.” It’s in the middle of the building, framed by a heavy block of granite, dark, grey, and sad, with the emblems of the former Soviet Union just above it. If this entrance was chosen to make an impression on the visitor, that goal has been perfectly achieved.

Dmitri is already waiting for us inside. A soldier in ceremonial dress stands between him and us. He must be close to six foot six. Without a word, he brusquely extends a hand towards us. “Passports!” Dmitri explains with a fixed smile. At that precise moment, Lana doesn’t know if I’m going to be able to obtain authorisation to get through the double security door. A stranger in the offices of the FSB, and a journalist to boot–that’s a lot to ask of a Russia in the middle of an international diplomatic crisis. Would a Russian journalist be invited into the offices of the DGSE in Paris, or MI5 in London? Not necessarily. In emails and phone-calls, Lana has found some good arguments for persuading the FSB. But everything could stop at the last minute. A few days previously, the Russian ambassador in Turkey was shot live on television by a Turk in the name of the jihad in Syria. At that point Dmitri nearly cancelled everything. Who knows whether the Kremlin might have changed its mind this morning? Our investigation into the disappearance of Hitler would be halted right there, on the landing of the FSB headquarters, only a few feet away from the confidential evidence.

LUBYANKA, MOSCOW, DECEMBER 2016

The rules are clear. You don’t touch anything. You don’t film anything without authorisation, and you wait. Lana listens and nods, then translates the recommendations detailed by Dmitri in the lift. Our contact is trying to be nice. He’s obviously trying. The men who receive us on the third floor not so much. Like Dmitri, they wear a severe uniform: black suit, black tie, white shirt. Unlike our host, their faces remain impassive. Neither aggressive nor suspicious, and certainly not benevolent. Real faces of bad guys from a fifties spy film.

Dmitri leads the way towards a corridor covered with a drab-coloured carpet that gives it an ageless patina and adds to the “hammer and sickle” atmosphere of the place. We are now surrounded by three FSB officers. No one speaks. The mediocre lighting doesn’t illuminate the whole of the endless corridor. From where we are we can’t even see the end of it. It must pass through the whole of the building, at least thirty or forty metres. The walls are punctuated at regular intervals by light wood-panelled doors. None of them is open. No names, just numbers to distinguish them from one another. On this floor alone, on this façade, there must be about twenty doors on either side. But are there any staff? The silence is total. Approaching one of the doors, I slow down and listen. Nothing. Not a murmur. Only our footsteps echo in spite of the reasonable thickness of the carpet. The Overlook Hotel in The Shining would seem almost welcoming and desirable compared with this floor on the Lubyanka.

“Here it is. Come in! Take a seat.” Our little group has joined two new members of the black-suit-black-tie-white-shirt gang. They were waiting silently outside one of the panelled doors. This one has the unusual quality of being open. The invitation to sit down and make ourselves comfortable is not rejected. And no questions are asked without a great deal of preliminary thought. The room where we have been asked to sit is an office of about ten square metres. Curtains have been carefully drawn over the window. A round table, a glass-fronted bookcase and poor-quality shelves, some Russian flags, a television, a sofa in mad leather, and even a synthetic mini-Christmas tree blinking nervously: the interiors of Russian administrative offices really do all look identical. Except that here the emblems of the FSB are proudly fixed to a wall. A sword covered with a shield emblazoned with the two-headed eagle of the Russian coat of arms reminds us that we aren’t in just any federal administrative office. Dmitri has disappeared. Time passes slowly but surely. A man, on the short and squat side, has joined us in the office. He doesn’t speak, and doesn’t answer Lana’s questions. He looks at us, observing us openly without bothering to pretend otherwise. Outside, in the corridor, the two people we just bumped into are discussing something. Some voices carry more than others. Particularly a woman’s voice. She has just arrived, and doesn’t seem happy to see us. What are they going to agree to show us? What orders have they received? To get things clear in my mind, I decide to take a look. I’ve barely headed towards the door when our invigilator is standing in my way. I improvise: “Wee-wee! Toilets?” My innocent air does nothing to soften the behemoth. I repeat my request. “Toilets? WC?” I know he understands. The man hesitates, gestures to me to wait and then leaves the room. A moment later, Dmitri appears and asks me to follow him. Here I am in the corridor again. I pass through the group I heard in heated discussion before. There are at least seven men and one woman. The woman is wearing a severe dark suit. Her blonde hair cut strictly at the back of her neck adds a little colour to this monochrome universe. Taller than most of her colleagues, and with shoulders at least as wide as theirs, she clearly shows me that our presence within these walls is an insult to her principles. Even from behind, I feel that her eyes never leave me. Another door, again without a name. Dmitri opens it. There are the toilets.

“They will bring the files at any moment.” When I get back to the office, I am welcomed by a triumphant Lana. While I was away, she was given confirmation that we would be shown the secret documents. So much the better, because I only have an hour and a half ahead of me before I have to go to the airport. All of a sudden, the whole group from the corridor bursts into the little office. The woman comes first. She carries some files in her arms in front of her as if they are holy relics. That and a big shoe box. Behind her, two men are delicately setting down a tailor’s dummy covered by a dust cover.

Now everything’s happening very quickly. The woman arranges the files and the box on the table, the two men finish setting up the dummy on our left, and the others just watch. Some of them are sitting on chairs, some are standing up. There are so many of them that they can’t all get into the room. We contemplate the scene without daring to open our mouths for fear that it’s all going to stop.

“The rules are as follows…” In a firm voice that brooks no opposition, the blonde woman sets out, one by one, the conditions that will govern the consultation of the documents. Lana listens, concentrating hard, hands crossed behind her back like a schoolgirl facing a teacher. She whispers a simultaneous translation for me. “Photographs are allowed, but only of documents. It’s completely FORBIDDEN to take a picture of any of the members of the FSB that you see here…” The word “forbidden” is given such emphasis by the secret service official that I even understand it in Russian. “And we will check each photograph that you take. Only the pieces selected by our services will be accessible to you. You will easily recognise them by the bookmarks slipped into the files.” A quick glance allows me to estimate the number of those bookmarks, and hence the number of documents allotted to us. There must be ten or so. It’s a good start, I reassure myself. “We’ve also brought you the physical proof of the capture of Hitler’s body by our troops.” Lana just has time to translate that last phrase when, like a pair of cabaret conjurors, the two men near the tailor’s dummy remove the sheet. They get the surprise effect that they’re after. A mustard-yellow jacket appears. It looks old but perfectly preserved. On one of the outside pockets, at chest level on the left, three badges are pinned: a medallion circled with red and white, a swastika at its centre, a military medal, and one last dark badge showing a military cap over two crossed swords. “This is Hitler’s tunic,” our FSB contact informs us. The three badges are perfectly identifiable: the medallion is none other than the official badge of the Nazi Party, the military medal an Iron Cross first class, and the last decoration the badge of those wounded in the First World War. Exactly the same as the ones regularly worn by Hitler.

“Where was this jacket found?” Our question immediately irritates the young woman. Would we dare to doubt the authenticity of the jacket? Which would amount to calling them liars, no more and no less. Dmitri intervenes. “Soviet troops recovered it on the spot, in the area around the Reich Chancellery.” Did it really belong to Hitler? Or is this a piece of theatrical staging, perfectly credible, but unverifiable? In the end it doesn’t matter. We’re not here to look at bits of fabric, but to obtain irrefutable evidence of the death of Hitler on 30 April 1945, and particularly details of the discovery of his body by the Soviets. Neither Lana nor I are particularly fascinated by these Nazi objects. Quite the contrary. Our lack of enthusiasm at the sight of the clothing and the medals prompts Dmitri to speed up the schedule. He gestures to his colleague to get on with the demonstration. With a heavy sigh she asks us to approach the round table. The files are just in front of us. The little chest that looks exactly like an old shoe box, a bit like the one at GARF with the skull fragment, has been set down a little further away, out of reach of our hands. “You’ll see that one later!” My lingering glance at the box has not gone unnoticed. “Right, here are the files. They contain the confidential documents concerning Hitler’s corpse.” Open, look, photograph, quickly, as quickly as possible. I have only a few minutes before I have to leave. Am I allowed to sit down to consult them? I ask the question. Lana can’t translate, she’s busy with Dmitri. I try speaking in English. Clearly the woman understands. “Da, da,” she replies. I open the first file, careful to respect the instructions about the bookmarks, and careful to avoid making the slightest mistake.

It’s a typewritten report. Poor-quality, almost rough paper. Creases show that it has been folded in four. The edges are worn and slightly torn, as happens when you transport a document in too small a pouch. Some of the letters have only been half-printed at the outset: the typewriter ribbon must have been worn out. A lot of details to suggest that the text wasn’t typed in an office in normal conditions. Was it in the ruins of a Berlin ravaged by bombing raids?

I immediately look at the date. Even though I don’t understand Russian, I can still read it. “Year 1945, month of May, 5th day.” The report states that the corpses of a couple have been found. The information is set out concisely, precisely, without interpretation. Including the information about the identity of the bodies.

The text concludes with four signatures, those of the four soldiers who made the discovery.

The next document is a map painstakingly drawn by hand and coloured. The quality of the paper seems to be just as poor as the other one, but this one has not been folded or damaged. The word “map” is written in large letters at the top, and just below it: “Place of the discovery of the corpses of Hitler and his wife.” It is a drawing of the garden of the New Reich Chancellery done with great detail and respect for proportions. It is scattered with little numbered dots, representing the exact spots where the bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels were found, as well as the ones believed to be those of Hitler and his wife. The document is signed by Guards Commander Gabelok, on 13 May 1945.

What has happened between the first document, signed on 5 May, in which nothing indicates that the bodies discovered are those of Hitler and Eva Braun, and the one dated 13 May, in which they seem to have been identified? The two reports are only a week apart. No sooner has Lana finished translating them than I loudly express my doubts and questions in French. How were the Russians able to identify the charred bodies with any certainty? I turn towards the FSB staff members around us. As diplomatically as possible, Lana and I try to find out more. To start with, we thank them. Through them we have the proof that the Soviet authorities thought they had found Hitler on 5 May 1945. But that can’t be enough for our inquiry. In the office, the atmosphere becomes a little more tense. Perhaps they weren’t expecting such a reaction. “Which camp are you in?” the young woman snaps severely at Lana. “Are you Russian or American?” Lana tries to maintain her smile as best she can. Since she won her green card by lottery in 1997 and then got an American passport, she’s used to this kind of remark. Traitor to her motherland, no less! “Aren’t these documents enough for you?” the FSB official goes on? “You’re like those American journalists who refuse to believe that we found Hitler first. You’re after a scoop.” Our conversation is taking a bad turn. Voices are raised behind us, things are getting heated. A bald man rises abruptly from his chair and leaves the room. Is that a sign that it’s all over already? But we have so many documents to consult, and there’s that box taunting us from the end of the table. I leave Lana to try and soften the woman, who is clearly opposed to our presence, and turn towards Dmitri. I’m sure he must speak English or French.

“Do we have a problem?”

Rather than answer, he gestures to me to be patient. After several long minutes the bald man comes and stands in front of me and holds out a big brown paper envelope. “Open, open!” I do so, as Lana explains herself more and more excitedly to her compatriot. Or semi-compatriot, I should say.

Mug shots, or not really mug shots, more anthropometric photographs, in black and white verging on sepia. They are enlargements. One shows a quite young man with his hair slicked back. His name is written in big Cyrillic letters: Echtman F., followed by a date: 1913.

On the other, a woman, also in the prime of life, wearing a gingham blouse. Her name written in Russian is translated as Hoizerman K., just beside another date: 1909.

In fact the two individuals are Fritz Echtmann (with two n’s) and Käthe Heusermann, the two Germans who took part in the dental identification of the bodies found outside the bunker. Fritz Echtmann, as a technician-prosthetist, worked with Hugo Blaschke, Hitler’s personal dentist; Käthe Heusermann was Blaschke’s assistant. Two biographical files accompany the photographs. We learn that in 1951 they were both sentenced to ten years’ forced labour by the Soviet Union. One for “having been dental prosthetist to Hitler and his close circle,” the other “for having served Hitler, Himmler and other senior fascists.” On the other hand, nothing on the conclusions of their macabre forensic examination, no photograph of the teeth in question. The bald man who handed me the kraft envelope notices my huge disappointment, not without a certain satisfaction. Is this really all they have to give us? Our allotted time is trickling away. We only have half an hour left. My visa expires this evening, and they know that my flight to Paris takes off in the afternoon. While we despair of obtaining concrete information, formal proof, our severe and taciturn “friend” takes some latex gloves from a pocket of her skirt. Gloves like the ones used by surgeons. At last, without a word, she picks up the “shoe box,” sets it down firmly in the middle of the table and removes the lid. As if drawn by a magnet, Lana and I immediately lean forward to catch a glimpse of its contents. No sooner have we realised what we are dealing with than the young woman is roughly manipulating the objects in the box. I hear myself shouting “stop!” I don’t know which of the two of us is more surprised by my daring. None the less, she obeys and puts everything back. I want to take the time to discover and understand what we have in front of our eyes. Too bad if I miss my plane. Discreetly, I signal to Lana to do the act that we’ve perfected together. The principle is a simple one: Lana talks and talks without interruption. Her task is to keep the minds of our interlocutors busy and let me observe and take photographs, as many as necessary. It’s quite simple and, thanks to Lana’s uncommon ability to talk for hours at a time, fiendishly effective. Without having to be asked, she launches into a monologue directed at our hosts.

The box is full of thick layers of cotton wool. Three objects are set on top of it, occupying all the room in it. The biggest consists of a large curved metal rod connected to a leather membrane the size of a leg below the knee. Immediately I think of the orthopaedic apparatus that Goebbels wore because of his club foot. Is it his? The whole thing is blackened and badly damaged as if burnt by a violent but short fire.

There is also a small golden object that has also been severely damaged by fire. It is a cigarette case. The inside is equally charred, but an engraved signature can be very clearly made out. It is the image of Hitler’s. I recognise that kind of stripe, like a lightning flash, crossed with a small line at the bottom, and that characteristic capital H. Below it, a date: 29.10.1934. Was it a present from the Führer to Magdalena Goebbels? Is this the “cigarette case” mentioned in the NKVD report from 28 May 1945? It said: “The woman’s body had on it a gold cigarette-case damaged by fire…” It would match. If it is authentic, the object was signed on 29 October 1934. On that date, Hitler had recently concentrated all powers in Germany. With the death of Marshal President Hindenburg on 3 August, he became both chancellor and president of the German state. And then he became the Führer.

But back to Moscow. I concentrate on this last object, the one that intrigues me the most. A small square box with a transparent lid. Written on one of the sides, in French and Russian, are the words “25 cigarettes No. 57, Société Bostanjoglo.” Apparently it was a box of cigarillos. I can see the inside through the transparent lid. Not a sign of any tobacco, but more cotton wool, on which the remains of a human jawbone have been thrown at random. A jawbone broken into several pieces. Even though I don’t say a word, the gloved hands of the FSB official delicately open the box and take out the four parts of the jaw one by one. Lined up in front of me are twenty-four teeth fixed to blackened bony tissue. Most of them false or covered with implants and gold bridges. I can only make out a few natural teeth, perhaps three or four. The others are made of either porcelain or metal. The man, or woman, to whom they belonged, had absolutely terrible teeth. “That’s the proof that you were looking for.” Arms crossed, and her expression still just as severe as before, my demonstrator for today at last decides to address me in English. I am bold enough to ask her for confirmation: “Are these Hitler’s teeth?” The “da” which is all I receive by way of answer is supposed to satisfy me. It doesn’t. Or at any rate it isn’t enough for me. Since we’re here, I’m going to take all my time and photograph these teeth and the remains of jawbones that go with it from every imaginable angle.

While Lana goes on deluging everyone else with her torrent of words, I manage to make myself understood to my watchdog. One by one, I ask her to position the human fragments in front of me. From the front, from the back, from either side, I don’t want to leave anything out. And, most importantly, there is this very unusual bridge connecting two teeth by passing in an arch over a third.

My photographic session comes to an end. Tensions ease. I save Dmitri and his colleagues from Lana’s logorrhoea and thank them. They have played the game. At least partly, because we still haven’t seen any photographs from the time of the corpses of Hitler or Eva Braun. “There aren’t any,” Dmitri cuts in. Of course we don’t believe a word of it. But it doesn’t matter. We are pursuing our inquiry. The puzzle is slowly beginning to come together. It was the forensic examination carried out by Hitler’s personal dental prosthetist and his assistant that would have persuaded the Soviets in May 1945. They were the ones who laid hands on the body of the Nazi dictator.

“Before you leave, look at this…” Dmitri holds out one of the files that we hadn’t yet consulted. He opens it up on one of the bookmarks placed there earlier on. “This is what was done to Hitler’s body after it was formally authenticated.”

I avidly decipher a few words in the document. At the top of the page on the right, “Top Secret,” the general title, “File,” the date, “4 June 1945,” and the signatures as well as the stamp at the bottom of the page. Lana translates the rest for me:

I was also allowed to photograph a hand-drawn map, carefully coloured in green and red. It shows very precisely where the remains of the Nazi ruler were buried. The town of Rathenow was not chosen at random by the Soviets. This small town which had about ten thousand inhabitants in 1945 and was situated in the Red Army-controlled zone was easily and quickly accessible from Berlin.

So if we are to believe this document, on 4 June 1945 Hitler’s body was found, identified, and buried with great secrecy in the Soviet zone of defeated Germany. However, officially, Stalin informed the whole world, and his Anglo-American Allies first and foremost, that Hitler was definitely still alive and that he had escaped! Why adopt such an attitude?

Before replying, we must immerse ourselves once again in the days that followed the fall of Berlin. Starting with 2 May 1945…

BERLIN, 2 MAY 1945

The capital of the Third Reich has just fallen. Some hours previously, at about 8:30 in the morning, the military commander of Berlin, General Helmuth Weidling, had ordered his troops to stop fighting. A decision taken immediately after the announcement of Hitler’s suicide. Weidling believed that the disappearance of the Führer freed the men from their vow to fight to the death. “On 30 April 1945, the Führer took his own life and thus abandoned those who had sworn loyalty to him. […] Every additional hour of battle prolongs the suffering of the civilians of Berlin and of our wounded,” he wrote in his public declaration. “In accord with the High Command of Soviet troops, I order you to stop fighting immediately.”

For the Allied staff, a new race against the clock began. Who would be first to lay hands on the Nazi dictator? Was he really dead, or was it a trick by the Nazis? The Soviets had the advantage of the terrain. The city remained under their control until the Potsdam Conference on 17 July 1945. Berlin would then be divided into four zones, one for each of the Allies: the United States, United Kingdom, France and, of course, the Soviet Union. The district around the Chancellery where the Führerbunker was located would be in the sector under Russian command.

Since they didn’t know with any certainty and didn’t just want to imagine things, the Soviet, American, British and, to a lesser extent, French investigators would spend the next few months questioning, counter-questioning and checking. And always that same question: what happened in the Führerbunker on 30 April? All those Nazis who had, intimately or otherwise, witnessed Hitler’s final hours became essential sources of information. And at least on the Soviet side, prisoners were immediately placed in solitary confinement. The secret services of the USSR almost systematically refused to share what they knew with their allies. No sooner was the war over than suspicion, indeed defiance, gained the upper hand.

The Russian archives of that period offer a gripping picture of those investigations carried out in the emergency setting of occupied Berlin. Stalin wanted to remain the sole conqueror of Nazi Germany, and didn’t for a moment envisage sharing his victory or his ultimate trophy: the Führer’s body. For the Soviet investigators, the task was twofold: to get there first and find Hitler.

Moscow mobilised the best parts of the secret services and the Red Army. Those men and women knew they would be putting their careers, even their lives, on the line within a few days.

Step one: find witnesses.

On the morning of 2 May 1945, while most of the German troops in Berlin capitulated, the area around the New Chancellery had still not been secured. In spite of their fury and their determination to die rather than lay down their arms, the last Nazi fanatics ended up being swept by machine-gun fire and shells. Immediately, the underground shelters were inspected by the troops of the 3rd Shock Army. They discovered terrified men and women almost deafened by whole days of bombing. They were wounded, tired, hungry. Some of them wore civilian clothes, others German army uniforms. The chaos was total. How could anyone recognise the members of Hitler’s inner circle in this crowd? A security cordon had been put in place. No one was to be allowed to leave without being questioned. But everything was going too quickly, and the risk of suicide attacks remained real. After a few hours the Soviets had to admit: everyone close to Hitler had escaped.

Apart from Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Krebs, Burgdorf and Schädle, who had committed suicide, everyone had left the bunker the previous night. It was difficult to know with any certainty how many people had still been inside Hitler’s shelter. At the maximum, about thirty, including at least four women, three secretaries, and the Führer’s personal cook. Their escape began at around 11 o’clock at night. To limit the risk of being captured, they divided themselves up into a dozen small groups. At thirty-minute intervals they left the government district via the tunnels of the underground. Once they were in the open air, amid the hubbub of the bombs and the street fighting, some tried their chances westward, others towards the north. A few exceptions aside, they wouldn’t stay free for long. Most of them would fall into the hands of the Red Army within a few hours. The others would be arrested by the British or the Americans. In the general confusion, they joined thousands of German prisoners and tried to melt into the crowd by trying to pass for private soldiers. Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, had teamed up with Erich Kempka, the Führer’s personal chauffeur. The two men quickly parted ways as they progressed along the blazing streets. Linge decided to seek refuge in the tram tunnels. As he approached a passageway leading to the surface, he thought he heard German soldiers. “From above I heard the call: ‘German panzers are advancing. Come up, comrades!’ I leaned out of the shaft and saw a German soldier. He looked towards me and beckoned. Scarcely had I left our hiding place than I saw all the Soviet tanks around me.”[34] The German soldier was bait for capturing fugitives. Linge hurried to remove the SS badges from his uniform, the silver eagle and the swastika, as well as his rank. The strategy worked, because the Russian soldiers, so overjoyed by the end of fighting, even offered him cigarettes. His true identity would only be revealed several days later thanks to the carelessness of another eminent member of Hitler’s close guard: his personal pilot Hans Baur.

Erich Kempka was luckier. On 2 May, while escaping and after leaving Linge, he was quick to swap his SS uniform for civilian clothes. A few hours later, when he was checked by the Red Army, he was easily able to pass for a German worker. He managed to leave Berlin and got to Munich a few hours later. In the end he was captured by the American forces that occupied that part of Germany.

Bormann, Hitler’s personal secretary and certainly his closest confidant, was nowhere to be found. Rumours soon began to spread. He had fled with Hitler, some people claimed; he was killed while trying to escape, others said. In the end his body was found in December 1972 in Berlin, during some road maintenance. In 1973 he would be identified by a comparative examination of his teeth against his dental file. Then, in 1998, tests were carried out on DNA taken from the supposed bones of Bormann and compared to those of his children. The results were positive.

During May 1945, the Soviets captured more prisoners from the Führerbunker than all the Allies put together had managed to do. But it didn’t make their investigation any less complex, especially because of the internal quarrels raging within the different army units and the many Soviet secret services. Everyone jealously guarded their spoils of war and resisted allowing their “precious” prisoners to be interrogated by anyone other than their own services. The man in charge of the first investigation into Hitler’s death was Aleksandr Anatolevich Vadis, the head of the SMERSH unit of the 1st Belorussian Front. The 1st Belorussian Front, led by Marshal Zhukov, was one of the main Soviet army units involved in the battle of Berlin. SMERSH was created in 1934 specifically to hunt down deserters, traitors, and other spies within the Red Army. SMERSH is the contraction of two Russian words: Smiert Shpionam, which may be translated as “Death to spies.” Very quickly, SMERSH became a counter-espionage service directly attached to Stalin’s authority. Vadis was one of Stalin’s men. In May 1945 this brilliant officer was thirty-nine and held the rank of lieutenant general. Vadis was anything but a beginner. He had joined the security service of the Red Army in 1930, Soviet counter-espionage in 1942 and then SMERSH the following year. A convinced Stalinist, with a formidable sense of political intrigue, he escaped the successive military purges leading up to the war against Germany. Stalin considered him one of the best men in his counter-espionage service. Logically enough, Vadis was granted every power to take his investigation to its conclusion. He was answerable to no one in Berlin. He reported only to Stalin and his closest circle, including the head of security for the USSR, Lavrenti Beria. No one else was informed of his mission. Even Hitler’s conqueror, Marshal Zhukov, was kept at arm’s length. He would never know anything about Vadis’s work. And besides, from the afternoon of 2 May, when the Führerbunker was definitely secured by the soldiers of the Red Army, the men of SMERSH of the 1st Belorussian Front took control of it, expelled the Soviet army, and forbade access even to senior officers.

On 27 May 1945, Vadis sent the report that Moscow had been so eagerly waiting for. In spite of the means at his disposal, Stalin’s envoy hadn’t performed any miracles. For want of time, he was unable to interrogate the last witnesses to Hitler’s last days. On the other hand, the master spy was able to present the result of the autopsy carried out on the alleged corpse of the Nazi dictator.

But before that, he explained the circumstances under which the body was located.

As so often with the Soviet secret services, the information contained in their reports had to be checked with extreme care. Here, Vadis was lying.

Elena Rzhevskaya was an interpreter within the SMERSH team of the 1st Belorussian Front, as was Lev Bezymenski, but within the 1st Belorussian Front itself. They were in Berlin on 2 May 1945. According to them, Hitler’s alleged corpse was not found on 5 May 1945 but on the previous day, and not on the instructions of Oberscharführer Mengershausen but by chance, thanks to the Soviet soldier Private Ivan Chourakov. According to Rzhevskaya and Bezymenski, Churakov, in the company of Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko of the 3rd Schock Army, had returned to inspect the place where Joseph and Magda Goebbels had been discovered on 2 May. It was 11 o’clock on the morning of 4 May when, just beside them, from a shell crater, Churakov called to Klimenko: “Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, there are legs here!”[35] The men started digging and disinterred not one body but two. Klimenko did not imagine for a moment that these might be the remains of Hitler and his wife. So he gave the order to have them re-interred. He did so because the previous day another body had already been identified by some Nazi prisoners as being Hitler’s. At 2:00 pm, Klimenko learned that, in the end, the authentication was not conclusive: they couldn’t be sure it was Hitler. The next day, on 5 May, Klimenko asked his men to dig up the two bodies found the previous day and inform his hierarchy.

This version of the discovery of the supposed bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun is a partial match with the secret document in the FSB archives that we have been able to examine–the document co-signed on 5 May 1945 by the same Private Chourakov about the discovery of two charred bodies. On the other hand, there is no mention anywhere of Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko. Elena Rzhevskaya also wondered about the officer’s extraordinary discretion. He simply replied: “I never delivered a report about the bodies to anybody.”[36]

As to the burnt bodies revealed on 4 May 1945, Elena Rzhevskaya claimed to have seen them: “The human remains, disfigured by fire, black and horrible, were wrapped in grey, soil-stained blankets.”[37]

Had Vadis, only, been informed about the conditions under which the two corpses had been found? As the uncontested head of counter-espionage in Berlin, it was his duty to know everything. But even if he did know that version, his decision to hide it remains comprehensible. He didn’t want to inform the Kremlin about the weird discovery. Still, he was taking a considerable risk in altering the truth. All the more so since everything had been recorded in a report sent to Moscow. Vadis was unaware of that detail because, as usual, the Soviet authorities kept all their information close to their chests, even within the secret services.

The other thing Vadis neglected to mention was that the two bodies had been stolen from the 5th Shock Army, which had been entrusted by Moscow with control of the Chancellery district. Stolen by members of its SMERSH unit. They had taken the initiative of not letting the 5th Shock Army get their hands on such precious booty. Discreetly, during the night of 5–6 May, the human remains were wrapped in blankets and placed in ammunition boxes. Elena Rzhevskaya was involved in this kidnapping: “the bodies were passed over the garden gate and loaded onto a truck.”[38] That was the perfect illustration of the absurd internal conflicts within the Soviet units. For the SMERSH commandos, if those bodies did indeed belong to Hitler and his wife, no one but them in Berlin must know. On 6 May, the two boxes were stored in the new headquarters of SMERSH, in the Berlin district of Buch.

Vadis obviously didn’t say a word about this “theft” in his report. He wanted to keep the secret about the existence of these bodies.

But let’s return to his report about the interrogation of Mengershausen, which he conducted on 13 May 1945:

During his patrol he met Hitler’s orderly, Baur, who informed him of the suicides of Hitler and his wife Eva Braun.

Vadis based his entire demonstration on the witness of a single German soldier, Harri Mengershausen. But the scene that he described so precisely was played out 80 metres away. A respectable distance that made all identification risky. Vadis was plainly aware of this, as the next part of his report reveals:

The SS adjutant even managed to give some details concerning the clothing: Hitler was wearing black trousers, a tie, a white shirt; Eva Braun a black dress. “I’ve seen her several times in that dress,” Mengershausen added. “I also knew her face very well. It was oval, the nose straight and thin, the hair light-coloured. So since I knew Frau Braun well, I can affirm that it was her body that was removed from the shelter.”

Once again, Vadis probably didn’t imagine that he could convince his superiors on the basis of a witness statement of a low-ranking SS man. While he was well aware of this, as in a good detective novel he also knew how to spin out the suspense. Here is his trump card, the one that he would claim as his ultimate proof:

Käthe Heusermann, Vadis’s treasure, his key witness. She was the young woman whose biography and anthropometric photographs have been handed down to us by the services of the DSB. The identification of the most wanted man on the planet rests entirely on the shoulders of a medical assistant in her early thirties.

Wasn’t this another instance of slightly shaky testimony? Vadis had no choice. His services had looked everywhere in Berlin, and there was no sign of the dentist Blaschke. According to Heusermann he had taken refuge in Berchtesgaden, far from the Soviet-controlled zone. That was true. Blaschke would be captured by the Americans. In the absence of the dentist, Vadis had to make do with his assistant. That was why he tried to stress Käthe Heusermann’s expertise.

It was only after checks on the young woman’s real knowledge of Hitler’s medical dossier that the jaws were presented to her.

Vadis’s demonstration stops there. He does go on to cite one other witness, Fritz Echtmann, the other German prisoner mentioned by the FSB during our visit. A dental prosthetist, he had also worked with Hitler’s dentist. Vadis used him to identify Eva Braun’s teeth.

And where were the remains of the two bodies? Vadis lingers at length on the jaws but remains curiously brief concerning the autopsy on the bodies.

After examination of Hitler’s charred body and that of his wife Braun, the forensic team concluded that because of the great damage done to the body and the head by the fire, no visible signs of serious injuries were discovered. In the oral cavities of Hitler and Braun they found the remains of crushed capsules of cyanide. Laboratory analysis of these showed that they were identical to those detected in the bodies of Goebbels and members of his family.

Nothing more. And yet the forensic examination surely deserves more than a few lines at the end of the report.

The details of that autopsy remain confidential even today. Neither at GARF nor at TsA FSB were we able to consult the complete conclusions.

At most we managed to glean factual information disseminated in other confidential reports. That is how we know the identities of the team that carried out the medico-legal study led by the coroner of the 1st Belorussian Front, Lieutenant Colonel Faust Chkaravski. We also know that the examination took place in the north-east of Berlin, in the district of Buch, on 8 May 1945, the day of the signing of the German surrender.

As to the results of the autopsy, this is what we found in an NKVD report dated 19 January 1946.

For greater detail about the autopsies, we must turn to Lev Bezymenski, the bilingual Russian-German interpreter who served in the Red Army. In 1968, it was as a journalist that this Soviet citizen wrote a successful book about the death of Hitler and had it published in West Germany. Europe was embroiled in the Cold War and the USSR was under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev. The publication of such a book was possible only if the Soviet authorities gave their agreement, and above all if they considered it to be in their interest. This point is not unimportant. Was Bezymenski telling the truth, or was he passing on propaganda from the Communist regime? Be that as it may, he explains in great detail how Soviet forces found Hitler’s body and how they succeeded in identifying it.

He even allowed himself the luxury of illustrating his words with hitherto unpublished documents such as photographs of Russian soldiers outside Hitler’s bunker. The caption states that they are busy “disinterring the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun.” There are also two photographs of members of the autopsy commission standing neatly in a row, with the bodies of General Krebs and Joseph Goebbels in front of them. No photograph of the autopsy of Hitler or Eva Braun however–the man in charge of the autopsy, Faust Chkaravski, claims that he was forbidden to photograph it.[39] Bezymenski did, however, publish two poor-quality photographs in which one can see two wooden boxes filled with a shapeless dark mass. If we believe the captions, these photographs show the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun.

Apart from these historic iconographic pieces, Bezymenski claims to have obtained all the autopsy reports on the bodies discovered in the Führerbunker. Those of Goebbels, of General Krebs, of the two German shepherd dogs and, of course, the bodies claimed to be those of Hitler and Eva Braun.

The tone employed in this book is deliberately political. For example, Bezymenski writes that “the medical evidence, incidentally, refutes the frequent declarations in western historical studies on the fact that General Hans Krebs, the last head of the general staff of the German land army, died like a soldier by killing himself with his weapon. […] The medical conclusions say: ‘Death by cyanide poisoning.’”[40]

It is all in this passage: the almost ideological opposition to the West; here the Soviet truth is based on scientific facts and can see through Western manipulations. Then there is the denigration of the Nazi enemy. So Krebs killed himself with poison, the act of a coward in the eyes of the Soviets. For Moscow, a real soldier would only commit suicide with a bullet.

Something that holds even more for a war lord.

It is no surprise that the autopsy on the body attributed to Hitler gives the following results according to Bezymenski:

The Soviet medical team also recorded the absence of part of the skull: the part from the back left, which was supposed to correspond to the piece stored today in the GARF archives.

According to Bezymenski, the doctors claimed to smell a strong odour of bitter almonds from these charred bodies, which had been buried, on the understanding that they were those of Hitler and his wife, five days earlier. Is it possible for cyanide to emanate such an odour with such persistence? And why does Bezymenski not retranscribe the results of the toxicological analyses of the organs of the two bodies? He writes only: “The chemical tests of the internal organs have established the presence of cyanide.”

It was of no consequence to the former Red Army interpreter. The goal was to present as certain the cause of the death of the man under examination: poison. At no point is the impact of a bullet mentioned. If this body was that of Hitler, it would have meant that the dictator had committed suicide with a cyanide capsule.

QED: Hitler was a coward like the head of his chief of staff, General Krebs, and of course Goebbels.

This desire on the part of the Kremlin to present the Nazi leaders as “subhuman” is apparent from the announcement of Hitler’s suicide to Stalin. On no account was his enemy to pass for a hero. So, if the German dictator stayed in Berlin to the end, in spite of the bombs, it was not because he was courageous, but because of his destructive madness.

The Lieutenant General of SMERSH, Aleksandr Vadis, says exactly the same thing in his report dated 27 May 1945 and addressed to Beria, Stalin’s right-hand man.

Beria took account of it and then passed it directly to Stalin.

As to the proof that the body was indeed Hitler’s–the teeth. They were sent secretly to the Kremlin.

The H file was about to be closed. Stalin could tell the whole world that he had found Hitler, that he was dead, that he had died like a coward in his rat hole.

Except that one man had revealed to the NKVD secret services that Vadis and SMERSH were wrong. This man was none other than Otto Günsche, Hitler’s aide and bodyguard. He too was captured by the Soviets after his attempt to escape the bunker, and very quickly identified. His first interrogation called everything into question. He was categorical on the matter: the Führer had fired a bullet into his head!

MOSCOW, MARCH 2017

Normally, only the family is authorised to consult this file. Vladimir Ivanovich Korotaev tells us this again. Even though it has been declassified and lost its “classified on grounds of national security” status, the military “Otto Günsche” file remains confidential. “Except if a member of his family formally used a request,” he insists, abruptly closing the brown cardboard dossier, which bears the stamp MVD SSSR (Ministry of the Interior, USSR). On the cover it says in big printed letters: “Personal File: Günsche Otto Hermann.” The same Otto Günsche who was Adolf Hitler’s personal aide-de-camp until his death. One of the few witnesses to the final act of the drama in the Führerbunker. Vladimir Korotaev is the deputy director of the “Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv,” the Russian State Military Archives. A state organisation holding almost 7.3 million documents concerning Soviet armed forces, then the Russian armed forces, as well as the military intelligence services. It also contains all the official documents of the Third Reich seized by Soviet forces at the end of the Second World War, including the personal files of the Nazi leaders, Goebbels’ private journal, and Himmler’s work diary. From our very first meeting, Vladimir has been more than courteous, almost kind. In his fifties, with “salt and pepper” hair and a short beard, he speaks quietly and says little. On the other hand, he does have a rare ability to listen. When I speak to him, his pale blue eyes don’t leave me for an instant. His face betrays no emotion, no reaction, like a wax mask.

Lana had contacted him some weeks previously, after our visit to the offices of the FSB. Before leaving the Lubyanka again we had requested some advice from Dmitri, our “case officer” in the Russian secret services. How should we approach the military archives? Did he have a name he could suggest to us? Perhaps a telephone number? “Work it out for yourselves” was all he would give us. “We have nothing to do with the military, this is the FSB. You’ve got the wrong institution.” Who says the Russians aren’t touchy? “Why do you want to waste your time in the military archives?” An old journalist’s reflex led me not to divulge all my information. Particularly to an eminent member of the FSB. Mightn’t he intervene to block our access to the military files? It was on the advice of the State Archives of the Russian Federation, GARF, that we were trying to get into the Red Army archives. “If you want more information on Günsche, that’s where you’ve got to go,” we were told by Dina Nokhotovich, the ancient archivist and keeper of Hitler’s skull. “You will want to consult the files of the Frenchmen taken prisoner by the Red Army in 1945.” Improvisation is a fragile art. Dmitri didn’t react to the answer I gave him. He said goodbye to us once more and walked us to the exit, to the pavement, to be precise. Well outside the building.

Military archives. The epithet “military” had added a hint of extra anguish for Lana and me. Was there a Russian institution as reluctant to talk to foreign journalists as the FSB? Yes, the army. How were we, Lana with her dual Russian and American citizenship, me as a Frenchman, going to get into those archives? Contrary to our expectations, it wasn’t as complicated as all that. The mother of a friend of Lana’s had once worked as a historian in the Russian State Military Archives. Admittedly she’s retired now, but she still has excellent contacts with the current directors. She was the one who passed Vladimir Korotaev’s name to Lana. From their first telephone conversation, Vladimir was won over. He imposed no conditions, he required no special authorisation from an official authority. He didn’t have to give an account of our request either to the Kremlin or to his superiors. “Just tell me what you’re looking for about the Third Reich,” he replied simply. “Hitler? Hitler again?” The deputy director’s voice changed immediately. Lana insisted. She altered her voice, making it both sweet and pleading. In the end he replied crisply: “One or two days. Give me time to find the right files.” Forty-eight hours later, Vladimir returned Lana’s call; he had found everything. The meeting could be arranged. The following week. At the end of the day, at 5:00 pm. In Moscow, the public services close their offices early. By 5:00 pm most Russian civil servants are long gone. A meeting so late in the day could not be a coincidence. Vladimir wanted to be sure that no one would see us in the archive offices. He would be alone.

It was already fifteen minutes past five and our taxi was hopelessly stuck on Patriarshy Bridge in the centre of the city. The driver had abandoned the very idea of getting anywhere and plugged a DVD player into his cigarette-lighter socket. He offered us a disheartening vision of local pop song videos full of young women who were delighted to writhe around in hot pants. Traffic jams make Moscow an impossible place to live, Lana reflects at length. The age of the empty Moscow boulevards has succumbed to the siren songs of liberalism. Old Soviet Ladas and Volgas have made way for cheap Asian cars and a flood of saloons and obese European four by fours.

How long would it take us to get to Vladimir’s office? “An hour…” the driver replies, tapping his GPS. “Perhaps a little less, a little more…” The melted snow so typical of the late Russian winters softly coats the windows, emphasising the depressing aspect of our situation. All of a sudden Lana gets out of the car and calls to me to wait for her. Given the state of the traffic, that shouldn’t be too difficult. Less than ten minutes later, when we have struggled barely fifty metres on, she reappears, her hair white with snowflakes, clutching a plastic bag. “This will help us apologise,” she says triumphantly, brandishing a bottle of Armenian cognac. ‘Everyone loves this in Russia,” she assures me.

“Really, really sorry, a thousand apologies,” I repeat in Russian the words that Lana is trying to teach me. I want to say them as correctly as possible to Vladimir when we finally get there. It’s past 6:00. The Russian military archives building, very socialist-Communist in style, is all concrete and opaque windows in a grim area on the edge of the city. It’s empty, or pretending to be empty. From outside, not a single light is shining in any of the ten or so floors. Only the ground floor is still illuminated.

The heavy front door closes behind us with an intimidating crash. Mouse-grey marble panels cover the entrance from floor to ceiling, creating the impression of an abandoned church nave. Perhaps not the best way of encouraging the circulation of heat. Our noisy entrance at least has the merit of making a head appear from the imposing wooden counter barring the way to the stairs. The head belongs to a woman in army uniform. She gets to her feet slowly as if the simple fact of moving requires a painful effort. Even her taciturn presence warms our hearts, proving as it does that the building hasn’t been abandoned since the fall of the Soviet Union. The very “vintage” furniture gives the opposite impression. Like that orange-brown Bakelite telephone or the Plexiglas clock with its hands in the form of swords. Objects from the Communist era that still accomplish their duties perfectly. The clock is on time and the telephone works, as our hostess demonstrates in front of our very eyes. “Two. Yes, there are two of them, Deputy Director. No, I can’t let them go up. You’ll have to come and get them. Yes. Yes. They’re waiting.” The conversation was a short one. The woman soldier delicately sets down the old telephone receiver and gestures to us to wait.

“We’re sorry, Vladimir, we’re so sorry. Really embarrassed.” Did he even understand that rumbling noise I made that was supposed to sound like Russian? The deputy director of the Russian State Military Archives keeps us waiting for about ten minutes. Then he turns up looking annoyed. In answer to our apologies he gives us a frowning half-smile, turns on his heels and sets off back towards the stairs from whence he came. Lana pushes me in the back to follow him. “It’s all fine,” she whispers to me, “he hasn’t put his coat on. That means he isn’t going to leave straight away.”

The Günsche file, impossible! Goebbels’ private journal, why not, but Günsche, absolutely not. Vladimir insists, it is out of the question to consult the personal file of the SS man Otto Günsche.

And yet there it is, in front of us. Vladimir has taken it from the shelves where it is stored and prepared it especially for this meeting. He has opened it up and shown us some ID photographs from the times, then nothing. Or almost. As if it were a happy coincidence, a fortuitous act of providence, the deputy director stands up and asks us if we would excuse him. “I’m going to get some other files from one of our stores. I’ll be away for about ten minutes. Wait for me here…” We watch him leave without a word. Then Lana smiles at me and says, “Go on!”

I turn the pages, my breath short, my hands clumsy. Otto Günsche is right in front of us. His life as an SS man, as Hitler’s personal bodyguard and as a prisoner of the Soviets. So many historical and previously unseen documents. Our investigation is taking a new turn. Günsche is the only member of Hitler’s inner circle who never agreed to write his biography. He was a quiet man who refused to give anything away in interviews. Apart from some answers that he gave to the American journalist James O’Donnell, until his death in 2003 at the age of eighty-six, Günsche avoided the media. His only statements were given to the Soviet secret services. But given reluctantly, and under constraint.

The first page of his personal file is merely his identification papers prepared by the directors of the Ministry of Interior Affairs on 4 June 1950, or five years after being captured in Berlin. This was a standard form for all prisoners in the Soviet Union. Apart from the handwritten words in bold red ink: “Special supervision.” Ref. 4146 Günsche Otto is not a prisoner like the others. Apart from the basic information such as his date of birth (1917), place of birth (Jena, Germany), height (193 centimetres), place of imprisonment (POW camp no. 476), the handwritten addition indicates that the prisoner requires additional guards. It is also specified that Günsche is in an appropriate state of health and that, in his prison, “he has no infectious illnesses.” The other pages are dog-eared and of different sizes, some barely any larger than the pages of a pocket diary. Most of them are written by hand, as if in great haste. Each time the signatory indicates his rank and function. A whole hierarchy of complex designations is revealed: there’s a “chief deputy for operational labour,” a “behaviour director,” a “special head of department”… Often, the notes only concern reports of aggressive behaviour on the part of the prisoner Günsche towards the Soviet Union. The reports continue for only a few lines, requesting appropriate sanctions. An enormous “approved” added diagonally by hand completes the set each time.

In most cases, Günsche is reported by people who share his daily life, German prisoners, former Nazis. The Soviet prison organisation encourages and satisfies the zeal of informers like a man by the name of Nokri. He addresses his letters to “Boss,” the head of his unit of prisoners, the 14th Brigade in camp no. 475. Special regime labour camp no. 476 was in the Oblast of Sverdlovsk, deep in the Urals, notorious for the harshness of its climate. The camp was one of the biggest in the Soviet Union.

Both the vocabulary and the writing of the informer lack confidence. Nokri is German and writes very bad Russian. “I received today from the camp guard the order to stack wood in the courtyard of the zone. […] Günsche Otto spoke in the room where the 74 men of the 14th Brigade live. He said: ‘I’m not going. The Russians know very well that I refuse.’ He said that as if he were our hero, a man above the Soviet authorities. […] Please, Boss, punish this person severely.”

The sentence is passed a few weeks later, after a rapid investigation. According to the document that we are holding in our hands, it is established that:

Günsche’s file consists of about a hundred pages like this. One of them attracts Lana’s attention. It is carefully typed, with the word “secret” at the top right-hand side. A stamp in indigo ink with the coat of arms of the Soviet Union completes the official, even solemn appearance of the document. “It’s the verdict of his trial,” Lana explains. It comes from the military tribunal of the region of Ivanovo, 300 kilometres north-east of Moscow. It is dated 15 May 1950.

Otto Günsche was thirty-two years old at the time, and had been a prisoner of the Soviets for almost five years. The identifying photograph that accompanies the sentence shows a prematurely aged man, gaunt but still with a hard, almost threatening expression, like a gauntlet thrown at the Russian authorities. Was the SS officer showing that he wasn’t anyone’s fool? That his trial was only a masquerade and that his sentence left no doubt of it?

Isn’t a sentence of twenty-five years in a camp worse than execution? How could anyone survive a sentence like that in the gulag? In what physical and mental condition would they be when they came out? Günsche would be fifty-seven when he had served his sentence. This former intimate of Hitler’s could not accept the prospect of an existence as a jailbird. “The verdict may be appealed before the appeal jurisdictions of the Military Tribunal of the troops of the MVD of the district of Moscow,” he was informed in writing. He had seventy-two hours to do that. A few pages later we find the result of his appeal. On 21 October 1950, or five months after his trial, Günsche was summoned before the judges again.

Here is the report:

Death, deportation, difficult prison conditions–the SS Sturmbannführer (commander) was prepared for all of those when he decided to escape from Hitler’s bunker. But he surely hadn’t expected the incredible treatment that Stalin would reserve for those who had been close to the Führer.

1 May 1945, in the Führerbunker. General Krebs had failed. The attempt to mediate with the Soviet chief of staff begun the previous evening had not been a success. The hope of an armistice had gone up in smoke. The Russians were demanding an unconditional surrender. The end was close and inevitable for the last residents of the imperial bunker. All day everyone had been preparing for an almost impossible operation flight. It was nearly 10:00 pm when the first group set off on a desperate course. Günsche was one of them. The two secretaries and Hitler’s nutritionist went with him, along with Bormann’s secretary. They were escorted by about a hundred soldiers. All night, together, they tried in vain to force their way through Soviet lines. On the morning of 2 May they found refuge in the cellar of a bar on Schönhauer Allee, in the centre of the city. None of these fugitives knew that the commander of German troops in Berlin, General Weidling, had given the order to surrender. In the afternoon, Russian soldiers surrounded the bar. “The war is over. Your commander has signed the ceasefire,” they shouted. Günsche and other German officers hesitated. But they had to face the facts: fighting had effectively ceased, and they no longer had any choice. Before handing themselves over as prisoners, the German officers helped Hitler’s two secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge, his cook, Constanze Manziarly, and Else Krüger, Bormann’s secretary, to leave the shelter discreetly. For the young women it was worth trying anything rather than falling into the hands of the Soviets. Hitler had warned them that they would be automatically raped. Gerda Christian would manage to get to Bavaria, where she would be arrested by the American army in March 1946. Traudl Junge, after a long journey through Germany, would come back to hide in Berlin, where she would be captured by the Red Army in early June 1945. Constanze Manziarly would never be seen again. Gerda Christian would claim that she saw her being arrested by Russian soldiers on 2 May 1945. On that day there is no trace of her in the Russian archives. Else Krüger would end up in British hands.

It was 10 pm on 2 May 1945 when Günsche surrendered without a fight. The interrogations began. Very quickly his status as an SS Sturmbannführer attached to Hitler’s personal staff brought him special treatment. Günsche found himself in the hands of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD. This state organisation concentrated the powers of the police of the country and managed the gulags and internal secret services. Günsche made his revelations directly to General Kobulov, the deputy head of the central administration for prisoners of war and internees (the GUBPVI), and to Lieutenant Colonel Parparov, his operational head of department. When questioned on 18 and 19 May 1945, he told them that Hitler had shot a bullet into his head. Oh-so-disturbing information for the Soviet secret services, because it called into question the hypothesis of a suicide by poison. A hypothesis officially preserved and maintained by the Lieutenant General of SMERSH, Aleksandr Vadis.

“Sturmbannführer Linge was outside the entrance to the bunker, near the door to Hitler’s office. At about 4:00 on 30 April 1945 he heard a shot.” Günsche’s answers are recorded as he delivered them, without embellishment or interpretation. Kobulov and Parparov noted each statement with great precision. What they heard both surprised and enchanted them. They had something to bring down their colleagues and, at the same time, their rivals at SMERSH. Kobulov and Parparov hated that counter-espionage service that thought it was all powerful. They were both men of Lavrenti Beria, the dreaded head of the NKVD. Beria hated SMERSH and its leader, General Viktor Abakumov, with a vengeance. The head of the NKVD was suspicious of this secret service that escaped his control. Because while, officially, SMERSH depended on the NKVD, in fact Abakumov often reported directly to Stalin without passing through Beria. The competition between the Soviet secret services couldn’t last for long. Stalin’s regime only kept the best. And Beria had decided to stay the best.

In May 1945, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria was forty-six. This pure product of the Soviet Revolution, originally from Georgia, like Stalin, was at the peak of his career. With his pretentious airs of a petty bureaucrat and his ludicrous pince-nez, he didn’t look like much. And yet… He was Stalin’s deputy in the heart of government, one of the members of the National Defence Committee, and he ran the external intelligence service of the secret police. Hated and despised, Beria was feared more than anything. Violent, ruthless, sadistic, vicious, psychopathic, alcoholic, the black legend of the “top cop” of Stalinist power was not entirely invented, but it needs to be treated carefully. It is true that he had a certain talent for running torture sessions, and indeed for torturing the more recalcitrant prisoners in person. Signing the deportation orders of the “enemy peoples,” or more than a million Soviet citizens from minorities (Chechens, Ingush, Germans from the Volga, Tartars from the Crimea…) didn’t bother him in the slightest. Stalin suspected them all of collaborating with the Nazis. They would be sent to Siberia and Central Asia to live in inhumane conditions. Only four years after their deportation, their mortality rate rose to 20 per cent. Almost 200,000 failed to survive the treatment dished out to them by the NKVD. Beria took responsibility for the massacre of over 25,000 Polish officers in the forest in Katyn in 1940 without blinking. Nikita Khrushchev would say of him that to reach that level of power in the USSR “he had passed through the different echelons by climbing over a huge number of corpses.”[42] But if Beria could be objectively considered a monster, he was still a politician with a phenomenal survival instinct. He understood very quickly that the fact of being Georgian like Stalin and of being almost insanely loyal to him did not make him untouchable. He could be eliminated from the system at any moment. Didn’t Stalin like repeating that there were only two options in the secret service: “promotion or the firing squad”? That phrase came tumbling into his head when he registered the rise to power of his former subordinate, General Abakumov.

Everything about Viktor Semenovich Abakumov was a tremendous source of irritation to him. Being younger–he was nine years his junior–and a Muscovite by birth while Beria was a hick, the son of wretched Georgian peasants, the head of SMERSH had the look of a conqueror, with an open and profound expression. With an almost jet-black shock of hair and square shoulders, he wore his uniform like one of those heroes celebrated in Soviet propaganda. Very much the opposite of Beria who was short-legged–Abakumov was a head taller–almost bald, short-sighted, and running to a paunch, the man that Stalin liked to present as his “Himmler”–in reference to Heinrich Himmler, the man responsible for Hitler’s worst atrocities–was physically no match for his direct competitor. Recruited into the special forces of the Red Army at the age of thirteen, Abakumov rose progressively through the echelons of the military before joining the intelligence services. There he became a specialist in surveillance on enemies within. Bugging technologies held no secret for him. Beria was quick to notice this new star. In 1938 he advanced Abakumov’s career within the NKVD by appointing him as one of his deputies. He then hoped to turn him into a sort of vassal. But Beria had reckoned without Stalin, who tore Abakumov out of his clutches and in 1943 put him in charge of SMERSH. Now, for the boss of the NKVD, Abakumov became a dangerous competitor and hence a mortal enemy. With tens of thousands of men and women at his service, Beria saw himself as the best-informed man in the country. And soon, thanks to the final victory against Nazi Germany, of a good part of Europe. So it was perfectly normal if nothing that happened in Berlin escaped him, even if he stayed in Moscow, two thousand kilometres away. He learned almost instantly of the discovery of Hitler’s supposed corpse. A discovery for which a SMERSH team got all the glory. For Beria, the threat of Abakumov was becoming increasingly apparent. His job was at stake. Luckily, with the arrest of this man Günsche, he still had a good card to play. Thanks to this giant, square-jawed SS man, this killer of Jews and Communists, Beria would be able to prove to Stalin that he was still indispensable.

The interpreter at the interrogation was given the task of using exact words to transcribe the prisoner’s thoughts as accurately as possible. In case of error, he was reminded that he risked imprisonment in a special camp in Siberia.

Without any apparent emotion, Günsche told them that the suicide of the German dictator occurred just before 4:00 pm on 30 April.

Who is telling the truth? Günsche, with his theory of death by bullet? SMERSH, who were certain that he had killed himself with cyanide? Unless it was both? Unless it was all a huge trick, and Hitler was still alive and kicking?

Beria has no idea. Abakumov, the boss of SMERSH, had sent him the report in which he concluded that Hitler had poisoned himself. To him, Beria, not to Stalin. For once, Abakumov respected the hierarchical route. But wasn’t this a way of associating Beria with this investigation, and making sure that they were bound to one another in the event of any possible reproaches from the “Little Father of the peoples”? And another purge of the secret services?

Stalin was not a man to grant his trust easily. Neither was he a man to forgive easily. His victory over Nazi Germany reinforced his power and his popularity within the Soviet Union. On the international scene, he also appeared as one of the strong men of the new world order that was now appearing. Even though, for many people, what he provoked was fear rather than admiration. He didn’t care. He had a talent for exploiting fear. During the war, he proved that no one could escape his most severe decisions. Not even his own family. His elder son, Yakov, was already thirty-four in 1941 when he was called up to join the Red Army and fight the Nazis. He was captured on 16 June 1941. His sister, Svetlana, related this tragic episode years later. “My brother was not a great fighter. He was too nice for that. He went to war because our father wanted him to. When he was taken prisoner by the Germans, the Nazi regime humiliated him. He was toured around Germany and presented like a zoo animal. Just imagine, Stalin’s son! It was perfect for Nazi propaganda. At the end of January 1943, the German Field Marshal Paulus was captured by our troops in Stalingrad. The Germans thought my father was going to swap him for Yakov. They didn’t know him very well.” In the end, Stalin’s elder son would die a few weeks later, on 14 April 1943, in a POW camp in Germany.

The message from the master of the Kremlin was clear: no special treatment for anyone. Besides, it had already been planned that if Yakov had survived, or even if he had escaped, he would be sent to a special camp in Siberia. “That was how they treated Soviet soldiers who had been through the German prisoner of war camps,” Svetlana Stalin says. “They were suspicious of them.”

Abakumov and Beria both remembered Yakov’s fate. They knew their master’s intransigence and cruelty. And above all they knew his rampant paranoia. The slightest error on their part could prove fatal. And all the evidence suggested that the report into Hitler’s death contained errors or at least large gaps. At the end of May 1945, Beria was sure of it. The head of the NKVD reread the thirteen pages of the interrogation of SS man Günsche carried out by his men on 18 and 19 May 1945. Did they need to tell Stalin and sow doubts in his mind? Nothing could be more dangerous. Beria chose prudence. The most extreme prudence. He kept his men’s work to himself and simply passed the file to Stalin without comment, whether positive or negative.

On 27 May 1945, Stalin held the report from SMERSH in his hands. For the Kremlin, Hitler’s death was official.

Günsche, for his part, was just starting to understand that he wasn’t about to leave the secret service jails. He was transferred from Berlin to Moscow, headed for the Lubyanka special prison under the control of the NKVD.

That same Lubyanka where we were granted permission to look at those teeth that were supposed to have been Hitler’s. Back then we were on the third floor. The interrogations of the SS prisoners were held on the first or second floor. We can’t help wondering if their groans reached the room where we had our meeting. As we progress with our investigation, that chilling sensation of awakening ghosts barely leaves us now. So much blood, tears, cruelty, inhumanity surrounds our quest like a dark halo. The truth around the Hitler file, even today, hides itself in a nauseating fog under the pretext of secrets of state and struggles of geopolitical influence. Seventy years have passed already, and the question is still a sensitive one. Will the spectre of Hitler one day stop haunting the West?

These reflections filled me as I ran through the Günsche file in the office of the deputy director of the Russian State Military Archives. Lana half-opens the door and glances quickly into the corridor. Not a sound. The building is still fast asleep. We can go on checking the official documents. I pick up a different one. Another German officer. I struggle to decipher his name: Rattenhuber, Johannes.

No, not Johannes. Johann, I see the photographs of a mature-looking man, his hair almost completely white, still wearing his German uniform. The photograph must have been taken only a few hours after his capture, in early May 1945. Holding his head very straight, and with a steady, cold gaze, this officer is clearly used to issuing orders and being obeyed. A few pages later I find myself looking at other pictures. Is it really the same man? The photograph dates from 1950. Now he’s just an old man, a pale copy of the proud German officer he once was. His face is emaciated, his skin tanned by excessive exposure to the cold, a shaggy beard sprouts from hollow cheeks, his hair is coarsely shaven. Who was he? I ask Lana to leave her observation post and come and translate the documents. The man’s pedigree stretches over several pages.

This argument of “only obeying orders” was also used by other Nazis in their trials. Notably Adolf Eichmann, the senior SS man in charge of executing the “Final Solution,” the extermination of the European Jews. An excuse that was systematically rejected, as here by the Soviet judges:

Consequently Rattenhuber was sentenced. But to how many years? Lana runs her finger along the lines of the document until she reaches the sentence. Twenty-five years! Like Günsche. In “re-education through labour camps.” It is added that everything that Rattenhuber possessed at the time of his arrest was confiscated from him.

I turn towards Lana. She has suddenly stopped translating. She looks away. What has she read that shocks her like this? She repeats out loud a passage from the trial that she had originally missed:

Mengershausen, the SS adjutant who, according to SMERSH, told the Russian soldiers where to find Hitler’s corpse.

“Ah, Rattenhuber! He’s an important piece in the Hitler file.” Vladimir makes us jump. He has come back into the room without a sound. He looks at us both, rather proud of his entrance. We look like children caught red-handed, with our fingers covered with jam. He doesn’t seem surprised, and is even amused by our embarrassment. “Rattenhuber was a general who was very close to Hitler, his head of security. You can’t take photographs of these documents. Look, why not, but nothing more,” he growls. Lana gives him her sweetest look and murmurs some words whose meaning I don’t catch. They hit the mark, judging by the smile that lights up Vladimir’s face. The deputy director finally throws on the table the files that he had gone to look for.

There are some which are even more important than Rattenhuber. Three key men, Vladimir is sure of it. “Linge, his valet…” he begins, sliding a cardboard file towards us. He opens another one and puts on his presbyopic glasses: “This one here is Baur, his personal pilot. Here…” All the files of the military justice system are now piled up in front of us. “With Günsche, Hitler’s aide-de-camp, and there you’ve got the lot!”

Was it these men, or at least their statements, that gave Stalin doubts? Was it because of them that the Hitler mystery survived for so many years?

They were all in Hitler’s personal service, and all present until the fall of the Führerbunker. They all fell into the hands of the Soviets.

Their interrogations, their imprisonment in special camps, everything is recorded. Among the documents from GARF, the ones passed on by the FSB, and now the ones rediscovered in military archives, we have the pieces to reconstruct the puzzle. At this stage, one thing seems certain: Stalin was informed about the tiniest details concerning the Führer’s last moments. But he would go on claiming to the Allies that his troops had not found Hitler.

MOSCOW, MAY 1945

Hitler isn’t dead!

On 26 May 1945, Stalin received representatives of the American President Harry Truman in Moscow. They had come to prepare for the future conference due to be held between the Allies in Potsdam in July, about thirty kilometres south-west of Berlin. Truman had just succeeded Roosevelt, who had died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of only sixty-three on 12 April 1945. If his mandate had begun under the most favourable auspices–the German surrender on 8 May fell on the day of his birthday–Harry Truman had not yet been put to the test among the Allies, particularly by the most unpredictable of them, Josef Stalin. It was no coincidence that the man he sent to Moscow was Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s diplomatic adviser and a man very familiar with the Soviet regime. Stalin knew him well, having dealt with him during the darkest hours of the war. The US ambassador to the USSR, William Averell Harriman, went with him. On 26 May, Stalin still hadn’t received the SMERSH report on the autopsy of the bodies found outside the bunker. The report would not appear on his desk until the next day. Nonetheless, he was aware of the identification process, and of the high probability that it was indeed Hitler. However, Stalin forgot to inform his American visitors. He even told them a story that would weigh heavily on relations between the two great powers. When Harry Hopkins mentioned his hopes of finding the Führer’s body, Stalin replied that “in his opinion Hitler was not dead but hiding somewhere. He said the Soviet doctors thought they had identified the body of Goebbels and Hitler’s chauffeur [Erich Kempka], but that he, personally, even doubted if Goebbels was dead […]. He said he thought that Bormann, Goebbels, Hitler, and probably Krebs had escaped and were in hiding.”[44] Stalin outlined scenarios about the flight of the Nazi leaders. Many countries could take them in or help them, he argued. Like Japan and Switzerland. Ah, Switzerland, that bank-turned-state that was overflowing with Nazi gold. Can’t we imagine the worst about bankers? As to Japan, don’t their myriad islands offer impregnable hiding places? The American diplomats were amazed. How could Hitler have reached the coast of Japan? Stalin had an answer for everything. In a submarine! Harry Hopkins ventured to express his doubts. He told his host that, certainly, he had already heard of a plan involving large German submarines, but to his knowledge none had ever been discovered. What, though, did reality, the possible, the probable have to do with anything? Stalin had said so, and that had to be enough to convince President Truman’s emissaries. And convinced they were. Since the dictator was certainly alive they insisted that he be found. Stalin agreed: “I have issued orders to secret services to seek those submarines. As things stand they have found nothing, but I think it possible that Hitler and his acolytes may have left for Japan in one of those submarines.”

On 6 June, a new meeting was held between Hopkins, Harriman, and Stalin. Stalin told them that he had still not found Hitler, but was convinced that he had escaped. Hitler was alive, he added. Yet, by this date, he had had the SMERSH report for at least a week. The report which concluded, thanks to the autopsy, that his enemy had committed suicide by poisoning. Stalin had validated this evidence by not asking for a second opinion. He had also been informed that his men had re-interred the bodies of Hitler, Eva Braun, and Joseph and Magda Goebbels near Rathenow on 3 June 1945.

Unfortunately for the Kremlin, a first breach in the secret of the Hitler file was about to appear.

On the same day, 6 June, but in Berlin, a Russian press conference was improvised in the offices of the Soviet military administration. American, British, and French reporters attended. They heard an officer from the staff of the Soviet Marshal Zhukov tell them that Hitler had been found and identified with almost a hundred per cent certainty. The next day, the headline of the New York Times read: “The identification of Hitler’s body almost certain, say Russians.”

Stalin reacted immediately, and tried to regain the upper hand. He sent one of his most loyal cohorts, Andrey Vyshinsky, to Zhukov to organise a new press conference. An official one this time. It was held three days later, on 9 June. The proud and martial Zhukov took the floor in his baritone voice. All the Western and Russian journalists based in Berlin were present. “We have not discovered a body that could have been identified as Hitler’s.” Murmurs spread through the audience. Non-Russian reporters waited for translations to be sure that they had understood the words of the victor of the battle of Berlin. Zhukov got his breath back and continued beneath the steady gaze of Stalin’s special envoy. “Hitler and Braun had good chances of escaping Berlin. They could easily have taken off at the last moment because they still had access to a runway.” The murmurs grew louder. Hands were raised to ask questions. “All of this remains mysterious,” Zhukov acknowledged. “All that I can say is that we have not identified Hitler’s body, and that I don’t know anything about what has happened to him…. Now it is up to you British and Americans to find him.” Stalin’s advisers could not have come up with a better way to destabilise the Allies. Hitler has fled, and it’s up to you to capture him, or tell us if he’s alive or dead. Because as things stand there is no body, Hitler is not dead. Zhukov had already left the room. A Soviet officer answered the press in his place. He put forward hypotheses, he explained and informed, or rather he spread disinformation. Rumours about his death? Fantastical. Where was he hiding? Why not in Spain, with that fascist Franco?

In this vast deception, the glorious Marshal Zhukov played the role of useful idiot. Everything suggested that he was unaware of the SMERSH report. Even he had been kept out of the biggest secret of the end of the Second World War.

The international press put out the new Russian version.

“Zhukov declares that Hitler may be alive in Europe. He had married his mistress shortly before. Together they may have escaped the German capital by plane.”

Spain got wind of the Russian declarations and felt obliged to deny any implication in the supposed escape of the German dictator. On 10 June, the Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs asserted officially that “Hitler, married or not, living or dead, is not on Spanish soil, nor is he authorised to come, and if he entered Spain he would not receive asylum.”

But doubts persisted. The Allied secret services asked the Soviets for access to the Führerbunker and for information to be shared.

Dwight Eisenhower, the American general and commander-in-chief of Allied forces in Europe, personally asked Zhukov whether Hitler was alive or not. On 18 June 1945, when General Eisenhower gave a press conference to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, a journalist was quick to ask him the question that was on everyone’s lips: “Do you think Hitler is dead? Are you convinced Hitler is dead?”

Strengthened by the doubts that he had managed to sow, Stalin persisted in his theory of a Hitler who was alive and in flight during the Potsdam Conference held between 17 July and 2 August 1945. He was thus lying to all of his Western allies in turn. This time, he explained that the German dictator, if he was not in Spain, was certainly hiding in Argentina. What was certain, he added, was that he was not in the German zone under Soviet control. These declarations finally shook the certainties of the Anglo-Saxon secret services and prompted them to speed up their own inquiries. If Stalin had wanted to weaken his allies with pointless investigations, he couldn’t have made a better job of it.

Argentina, Japan, Spain, and even Chile–so many false trails deliberately laid by the Soviets to throw off the British and American intelligence agencies. The Potsdam Conference concluded with the Hitler mystery. Stalin was radiant. Of the three great men who had fought and defeated Germany, he was the last one still in the saddle. Roosevelt was dead and Churchill, after losing the elections, had stepped down from his post as prime minister right in the middle of the conference, on 26 July.

As to Hitler, Stalin, who was sure that his men had found and identified him, knew exactly where his secret services had buried him. A long way from South America and Japan. More precisely, in the little town of Rathenow, only an hour’s drive from Potsdam. Any trace of his interment had been meticulously erased and his location was now a state secret shared only by a handful of people. To remember where the grave was located, Russian agents drew a map with clues worthy of Stevenson’s pirates. We had held these confidential documents in our hands in the FSB archives: “The grave has been flattened out at ground level, and small pine seedlings have been planted on the surface forming the number 111. The bodies […] have been buried at a depth of 1.7 metres and placed in the following order: from East to West: HITLER, BRAUN Eva, GOEBBELS, Magda GOEBBELS, KREBS, the GOEBBELS children.”

Stalin would never reveal that state secret.

The manipulation of the master of the Kremlin would lead the Allies to work investigating the German zones under their control.

Three months. It took the British only three months. By 1 November 1945, their investigation into what happened to Hitler was at an end. This information was given to a young thirty-one-year-old British historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper. This brilliant Oxford-trained history professor had joined the army as soon as the United Kingdom had gone to war with Nazi Germany, in the “Secret Intelligence Service,” to be precise. While he had thought that his time in the army would come to an end along with the war, in the summer of 1945 he was asked to write a report into the disappearance of Hitler. The task was huge, but Trevor-Roper received every imaginable help from London to complete his investigation. For example, he was able to question all the Nazi prisoners held in the British zone, but also those in the American and French zones. As to the Russian zone, it was better to assume that no help would be forthcoming. At best he would be allowed to visit the Führerbunker, which was still in Soviet hands. Trevor-Roper finished his report in late October 1945. A big press conference was planned for 1 November, in the course of which the broad lines of his work would be set out under the title “The last days of Hitler and Eva Braun.”

It concluded with Hitler’s suicide by bullet and not by poison. A more complete file was sent to the secret services of the three other powers present in Berlin: the Americans, the Soviets, and the French.

By indicating that they planned to make Hitler’s suicide public, the British were putting pressure on the Russians. The goal was to stop the disinformation campaign begun by Moscow. However, the British intelligence services acknowledged in a preamble that they had been able to rely on only a small number of witnesses.

But all of these men were either thought to be dead or reported missing. Other important Nazis had survived, however. Some of them were in the hands of the Western forces, and were questioned. There were those who had fled the bunker very early, like Albert Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and his Armaments Minister, or Ritter von Greim, the last Aviation Minister. And those who were believed to be present at the supposed death of Hitler. In summer 1945, there were only a handful of these who had been taken prisoner by the Anglo-Americans, notably Bormann’s secretary, Else Krüger, and more importantly, Hitler’s personal chauffeur, Erich Kempka. It was Kempka who informed them about the death of the Nazi dictator.

The British could not conceal the relative weakness of their sources. Subtly, they suggested in their document that they knew where the main living witnesses were. On the Russian side.

The same was true of Hitler’s servants.

On that date Günsche had already been put in solitary confinement in Moscow and was being regularly interrogated, as was Linge.

Rattenhuber was alive and shared the same prison–the Lubyanka–as Günsche and Linge in Moscow.

In spite of the lack of witness statements, the British secret services reached the conclusion that Hitler had committed suicide.

The work of the British put the senior Soviet officers in a very uncomfortable position. The theory of suicide by poisoning, which they had acknowledged to the Kremlin, was under attack. The British report was added to the statements that Günsche and Rattenhuber had given the NKVD in June, then the statement given by Linge a few weeks later. The option of Hitler having committed suicide by firearm recurred more and more often in the interrogations. And if the men of SMERSH, the ones who had quickly carried out the inquiry into Hitler in May–June 1945, had been mistaken about the form of the suicide and that Hitler had killed himself with a bullet to the temple or in the mouth? That would mean that the body on which the autopsy had been carried out was the wrong one!

The Russian general Ivan Serov was the representative of the NKVD and the supreme deputy commander of the Soviet military administration in the Russian zone of Germany. Serov was in fact one of the most senior Soviet officers in Germany. Beria had chosen him personally for his extraordinary capacity for work, and most of all for his flawless loyalty. In mid-November, Beria received an urgent telegram from Serov. He informed him of the delicate situation facing Vadis and SMERSH.

Beria remained suspicious. He wasn’t used to sharing documents classified as “secret” with strangers, including military allies. But the opportunity to eliminate one of his competitors, in this instance Abakumov, the head of SMERSH, was too good to miss. By passing the Hitler file to the British and the Americans, he knew that SMERSH’s errors would be brought to light.

Hesitating, Beria sought the advice of Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, the first Vice President of the Council of Ministers and Minister of Foreign Affairs.

This last phrase is circled and underlined in pencil. This is followed by Beria’s signature in red pen.

Molotov saw no objection to the Allied request. His positive answer gave Beria an ideal alibi. Stalin would not be able to accuse the head of the NKVD of having placed his rival in an untenable position. He hurried to warn his agent in Berlin, General Serov.

Serov would not provide any information because SMERSH refused to collaborate. The conflict between the two Soviet secret services exploded. It was too much for Beria. He wanted to launch a new enquiry into Hitler’s last hours, but this time it would be an inquiry conducted directly by his men. Before that, wouldn’t he have to give an account to Stalin? Abakumov remained one of the protégés of the master of the Kremlin, and a head-on attack was not an option. A letter explaining the situation should sort things out, Beria said to himself. He asked his assistant, Merkulov, to get to work and find the right words for this most important message.

In fact it was not one letter but two that his assistant had to write. Or more precisely, two versions of the same letter. In one, Beria suggested giving the Allies a translation of the secret report from SMERSH, while in the other he only let the Western investigators inspect the garden of the bunker, at the spot where the bodies had been burnt.

On 19 December 1945, Merkulov delivered both versions to Beria.

Beria held all the cards. What version should he choose? And who should he send it to–Stalin or Molotov, the Minister of Foreign Affairs?

He thought for hours. Reworked the wording, crossing out, annotating them time and again. With Stalin, mistakes were impossible, every detail was important and could influence anyone’s career, even Beria’s, if not his life. So the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun became the “alleged corpses.” Here is the final version:

At the last minute, Beria changed his mind. He decided only to send the letter to Molotov. Comrade Stalin would never receive the message. And the Allies would never gain access to the SMERSH report. They would only be able to visit the garden of the Führerbunker.

But that wasn’t the most important thing. Now that Molotov had been informed of the doubts of the Allies about the non-discovery of Hitler’s body by the Soviets, and of the causes of Hitler’s death, Beria created the ideal conditions to launch his counter-investigation. This was fully justified. It would be secret and extremely detailed, and would definitively answer the mystery of Hitler’s disappearance.

The Code name for the operation: “Myth.”

RUSSIAN STATE MILITARY ARCHIVES MOSCOW, MARCH 2017

The alarm hasn’t sounded. So the air is still breathable. Vladimir Korotaev checks that the ventilation is working properly and allowing oxygen to circulate. The protection system of the rooms where the archives are stored might seem outdated, but it proves to be fiendishly effective. To avoid the risk of fire, the oxygen is simply expelled from the room every evening when the offices close.

This security process will start in only thirty minutes’ time. Then the alarm will be heard and we will have just a few seconds to evacuate the room. Vladimir has told us several times in the maze of corridors and lifts that has brought us here. As soon as the signal sounds, we must leave immediately. After that it will be too late; the doors will be automatically blocked and the oxygen evacuated. Death will almost certainly follow! “Is there no way of stopping the process, an emergency alarm?” we ask in surprise, running after Vladimir. “No!” His tone does not invite any further questions. And besides, it isn’t in our interest to question the security measures in the archives. Or to give Vladimir a valid reason to stop the guided tour that he is giving us.

In theory, we shouldn’t be in this part of the Russian State Military Archives. A few minutes before, Lana managed to persuade the deputy director to let us look at the holy of holies, the rooms where all the archives of the Red Army since its creation are stored, but also documents about the Nazi enemy seized during the war. How did Lana persuade him to let us in? Thanks to her usual technique, which is summed up in a word: “psychology.” To be frank, she also uses her smile and a perfect knowledge of the Russian mentality. What button did she press this time? “Is that all you have? I’m a little disappointed…” Self-respect. Lana knew that this was a sensitive area for many men, and staked everything on touching it. Vladimir wasn’t expecting that. We were still in his office consulting the last files of the prisoners of war–Linge, Günsche, and the others. But it had taken him some time to locate them on the dusty shelves of the archives. An unfamiliar effort for this senior official, more accustomed to issuing orders than to executing them. As pleasantly as possible, slowly, with precision and persistence, Lana went on ploughing her furrow ever deeper until she touched the nerve and tickled it delicately, just the right amount. “Are there really no other important pieces that might help with our investigation?” She pressed a little more, again and again. Vladimir began by taking his glasses off. He rubbed his eyes as if to dispel some pain. He was hardly tempted by the idea of going back to the archive store and leaving us alone with the files. Sensing his hesitation, Lana pounced: “We can come with you to the archives if you like…” The suggestion struck him as so out of place that he didn’t reply. Then, against all expectations, after looking at his watch, he said simply: “Let’s go. We still have a little time.”

Two small red electric panes stand over a greenish armoured door. The first one is lit, and bears the words “Automatic Shutdown.” The other, which is unlit, reads: “Gas. Do not enter.” Behind the door is one of the ten store-rooms of the Russian State Military Archives. There is one on each floor. Inside, the air is dry, and the temperature, lower than in the offices, mustn’t rise beyond 18 to 19 degrees. Imposing ceiling lights give off a whitish light that makes the place feel like a hospital. Only every other lamp works, giving the room an atmosphere of permanent twilight. Here we are in the heart of the Russian State Military Archives. Metal shelves about two metres high stretch over an area of at least two hundred square metres. They are all filled with large rectangular cardboard boxes. Inside are paper documents, most of them stamped “secret.” With at least fifty shelves, this room alone contains the trifling amount of five thousand boxes. A veritable wet dream for a historian. What mysteries lie in those boxes, right here in front of our eyes? Stalin’s secret accords with Chiang Kai-shek against Mao, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Frenchmen arrested in SS units… So many mysterious files carefully classified and within reach. I open a box at random, typed pages, others on carbon paper covered with obscure diagrams. It would take months and months to analyse, dissect, check. “And nothing is digitised,” Vladimir explains in a low voice. So many historical tragedies, so much pain, so many state secrets emanate from these shelves that even without agreeing in advance, all three of us surprise ourselves by talking in a whisper. “You will now have a better understanding of why it’s complicated for us to find the documents with any precision.” The classification system of the military archives works in the old style: small cards sum up the themes, years, and events for each box but without more details than that. The task becomes more complicated when the documents are in foreign languages. Like the ones that come from the Nazis. “There’s nothing that we don’t know,” Vladimir says in an attempt to moderate our astonishment. “Our historical collection has nothing to teach us. Everything has been declassified, or almost…” Ah, that “almost” that crops up all too often in our inquiry. The photographs of the autopsy of 8 May 1945 on the alleged corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun? Impossible. Officially, they don’t exist. Stalin’s orders to hide the truth from the Allies? Likewise. The results of the forensic examination of the bodies? The list goes on. Vladimir hears it and sighs. We’re tiring him out. It’s time to leave the room. We’ve had our half-hour. The gas, the oxygen, the ventilation, he lists the security instructions again. We’ve got to get out of here. Quickly.

The five steel bolts slide with a loud click into the vertical reinforcements of the door. Vladimir turns the handle to check that the double door is well bolted. Then, once the keys are back in the depths of his pocket, he shows us to the lift. The visit is over. It’s no surprise that he has carefully left the files concerning the “Myth” operation in the store-room, far from our eyes. The files on Linge, Günsche, Baur, and Rattenhuber remain hidden away, even today. Luckily we were able to consult them in his office. Briefly, admittedly, but for long enough to make use of the essential parts: the years of solitary confinement, forced labour, and torture. Obscure SS men who had become the prisoners most sought after by the conquerors of the Third Reich. Would violence make them speak at last? Would they confess, complain, crack?

No one can stand up to the Butyrka for long. The Butyrka is a prison, the most famous in Moscow. It is on the edge of the city centre and even today it remains a provisional detention centre. In 1945 the Butyrka would make the Lubyanka seem almost like a pleasant holiday retreat. If the cells were cold on winter nights, they were even more unbearable in the summer months when Moscow is crippled by high temperatures. The Butyrka is not entirely devoid of creature comforts, but its conditions are slightly dated. To the eighteenth century, to be precise, the date of its construction. Originally it was an army fortress. Catherine the Great of Russia wanted to feel that she was protected very close to her throne by her loyal Cossacks. Cossacks, however, are very much at home with a lack of comfort. Particularly since they weren’t locked up in rooms only a few metres square and, even more importantly, weren’t tortured throughout the night by sadistic thugs. Unlike the men who escaped from the Führerbunker.

For reasons of greater efficiency, all the prisoners more or less implicated in the death of Hitler were brought together at the Butyrka in early 1946. To make sure this happened, the NKVD officers had to spend weeks scouring the Nazi POW camps under Soviet control–except the ones under the surveillance of SMERSH, who still refused to collaborate. They were looking for witnesses to Hitler’s last hours. Very gradually a precise list of about thirty Nazis was drawn up, and their transfer authorised. The prisoners were then classified according to their degree of importance:

Level 1 included all those who were the focus of attention of the Soviet secret services. These were given special treatment, especially:

Some had tried to hide their true identity after their arrest in early May 1945. People such as Linge, the Führer’s valet and confident. Arrested in 2 May 1945, he had managed to disappear into the crowd of Nazi prisoners. “I was captured, but that was all. […] No one was interested in me,” Heinz Linge notes in his memoirs. He was sent with several thousand other German soldiers to a camp near the city of Poznan, east of Berlin. Interrogated, he told the Soviets that he was just a simple officer from one of the administrative services. His strategy worked marvellously until the intervention of another of Hitler’s confidants, the pilot Hans Baur. Having also been arrested by the Red Army and imprisoned in the same camp, he reminded anyone willing to listen of his qualities as a general, and that as such he was to be treated with respect. “As well as being a general, I was Hitler’s personal pilot,” he would repeat all day. In the face of Soviet disbelief, Baur had an idea. He spotted Linge in the mass of Germans from the POW camp. Good old Linge would be able to testify in his favour, he said to himself. He alerted his jailers, assuring them that Linge would be able to testify that he was indeed Hitler’s personal pilot. He knew because he was Hitler’s valet. “My disguise was blown. I had to write down the answers to all their questions which I had answered falsely before, but this time honestly.”[46] At least Baur obtained satisfaction. He was taken seriously, and rightly considered as a prisoner of prime importance. He immediately left the wretched camp in Poznan, bound for Moscow and the Lubyanka prison. With Linge. Where torture sessions worthy of their rank awaited.

Level 1 prisoners were separated from one another. But they were not alone in their cells. Each of them shared a cell with another inmate. A German, but one that they didn’t know. These comrades in misfortune would soon become their confidants, the only ones willing to support them, to listen to their complaints, their weeping, their rages. To listen to them–oh yes, and listen they did. They were spies, informers, in the pay of the NKVD. Their task was to gather every least scrap of information and to keep an eye on the physical and mental state of their cell-mates. To avoid arousing suspicion, they took advantage of the daily interrogations of the SS prisoners to deliver their reports to their superiors.

The infiltrated agent excelled in the art of managing the mental and physical resistance of the SS man under his charge.

Each weak point was used to obtain total collaboration during the interrogations.

Heinz Linge certainly remained the most important of the level 1 witnesses. And one of the most fragile psychologically. Linge was not a born fighter, far from it. The impeccable dark uniform of the SS officer had never been splashed with blood or mud on a battlefield. At most it had received a few drops of French champagne or Hungarian Tokay during an official cocktail party where the drink flowed freely. That lovely uniform of his, which would be brutally torn from him by his jailers. An NKVD report goes into detail:

SS officer Linge had never been subjected to violence before. Throughout the war, he had known only the wordy diatribes of the bosses of the regime and Hitler’s mood swings. The atrocities that were taking place in Europe every day on his master’s orders remained immaterial concepts as far as he was concerned. The stench of the dead in the concentration camps and on the battlefields; the smell that was a mixture of guts, excrement, and blood–that smell of death did not fill the hushed apartments of German power. How could he imagine it? How could he have any idea of such inconceivable, inhumane matters when he had never once had to confront them? Linge didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.

He had served as Hitler’s valet for ten years. Now that the Nazi regime had collapsed, he was paying the price. And it was a heavy price. His promiscuity, his intimacy with the Führer, brought very special treatment from the Soviets. At the start of 1946 they were convinced that he was the key. Linge became an enormously important figure. But nothing had predestined him for this role.

Heinz Linge was nineteen and a bricklayer when he joined the Nazi Party in September 1932. A few months later he joined the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS organisation. In 1935 he was selected along with two other soldiers to enter “the Führer’s personal service.”

From that point on he never left Hitler. He looked after his wardrobe, his personal effects on his travels, he checked that the servants were looking after his house properly. During the war against Poland, in September 1939, rather than being sent to the front, he became Hitler’s one and only butler. The two others who failed to make the grade were sent back to their fighting units. By way of recompense, he was even given the rank of SS Hauptsturmführer [equivalent of captain], and the title of “head of the Führer’s personal service staff.” At the end of the war, in the shelter of the Führer’s bunker and still without having done any combat duty, he was awarded the rank of SS Sturmbannführer (commander).

Baur didn’t live up to the image of the Nazi warrior with nerves of steel cherished by the regime’s propaganda either. Like Linge, this postman’s son had earned his stripes in the drawing rooms of the Reich Chancellery. Certainly, he went through the test of fire at a very young age. In 1915 he was just eighteen when he took part in the First World War, initially as an assistant mechanic in the air force and then as a pilot. With six officially recognised victories in aerial combat, he gained the much-desired status of aviation “Ace” (to be considered an “Ace,” you had to prove at least five victories). After the defeat of Germany in 1918, Baur stayed in the army for a few years. He was demobilised in 1922 with the rank of lieutenant and went on piloting, but as a civilian. In 1926 he joined the new national airline, Lufthansa, becoming a captain. His talents as a pilot and his commitment to the Nazi movement (he became a member in 1926) assured him a brilliant future. As a pilot on the Berlin–Munich line, he met and bonded with certain passengers in dark uniforms. One of these was a man by the name of Himmler, the head of the SS. He was the one who whispered Baur’s name to Hitler in 1932. Germany was still a democracy, and was going through an intense general election campaign, both presidential and legislative. The NSDAP, the Nazi Party, had the most to gain. A victory seemed possible, and the power that went with it. Hitler was looking for a good pilot who could transport him from meeting to meeting to help him win elections. Baur accepted. This idea of the Nazi leader was revolutionary. Using the airways to move faster and give speeches in several cities on a single day. None of his adversaries had done that before him. Hans Baur agreed to become the Ständiger Flugkapitän und Chefpilot des Führers (“Führer’s captain and chief pilot”). He helped him on two occasions, once between 3 and 24 April, then between 15 and 30 June. It was a success. The NSDAP was the first German political party in terms of both votes and number of deputies. After new legislative elections in November of the same year and months of negotiations, Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January 1933. He would never forget Baur’s precious help. He immediately made him his personal pilot and refused to be transported by any other. He also awarded him the grade of SS colonel. In 1944, at the age of only forty-seven, Baur would be appointed SS-Obergruppenführer (army corps general) and police generalleutnant (division general). In spite of these two ranks, he would never command either a military unit or a police platoon.

In 1946, this drawing-room “double general,” a close confidant of Hitler, suffered badly from his detention in Russian jails. His attempted escape from the Führerbunker on the night of 1–2 May was disastrous. Seriously wounded, he had his right leg amputated in detention. It was a German doctor, another prisoner, who performed the operation. The conditions were far from ideal. “There was no scalpel available,”[47] Baur remembers in his memoirs, “so the surgeon amputated me with a pocket knife.” It was almost certainly a saw.

Psychologically fragile and genuinely terrified by the torture sessions, Baur had no hesitation in denouncing his former SS colleagues to save his skin.

As soon as he arrived in Moscow, he was initially sent to the Lubyanka. After Linge, he denounced the telephone operator at the Führerbunker, SS Oberscharführer (adjutant) Rochus Misch. Sixty years later, Misch would relate in his autobiography:

This piece of advice would not be without consequences for NCO Misch. He found himself propelled onto the list of important witnesses. His fate had already been sealed a few weeks previously, when he had suggested helping Baur. The pilot had just had his leg amputated in the camp in Poznan. Misch, who knew him from having bumped into him on several occasions in the Führerbunker, had offered him his services. He changed his bandages every day and saw to it that he was fed. In return, the adjutant hoped to profit from the special treatment normally reserved for generals in the POW camps. This reasoning might have applied in the one controlled by the Western Allies, but not in the Soviet zone. Very quickly the Russians informed Baur that he would be transferred to a sanatorium in Moscow. There, they assured him, he would be treated as his rank of general deserved. He accepted, but only on the condition that his assistant, Misch, could go with him. Baur had a perfect recollection of the scene: “I had succeeded in getting a former telephonist in the Reich Chancellery, a corporal [he was an adjutant[ named Misch, allowed as my batman, and now, with some difficulty, I got permission for him to accompany me to Moscow, though I’m not sure that it turned out to his advantage.’[49]

A gentle euphemism. Rather than in a sanatorium, Baur found himself in the Butyrka, and so did Misch. They met Linge, Günsche and Rattenhuber, who were already settled in their cells. Fleas and cockroaches by the hundred, the icy cold of Moscow nights, barely edible food, the conditions of their imprisonment petrified proud General Baur and his trusty Misch. The bullying began very quickly. Particularly the one that involved cleaning a floor filthy with urine and excrement with only a plain handkerchief. After this came the physical violence during interminable interrogations. Baur couldn’t understand what he was doing here. It had to be a mistake. Admittedly he held the rank of general, but he had never been in command or ordered a massacre. And he didn’t know Hitler very well either. That was what he endeavoured to explain to his jailers. To prove his good faith and his willingness to collaborate, he quickly denounced Günsche. He was the one who knew everything.

The Russians didn’t wait for Baur’s advice to take an interest in Günsche. But the SS colossus posed a problem to the NKVD investigators. Unlike Linge and Baur, he proved to be tough. Even “Siegfried,” the spy who shared his cell, couldn’t soften him. Suspicious and naturally taciturn, Günsche revealed nothing useful.

The secret services would try to find ways around this. They regularly changed the infiltrated agents, altering their profiles to win his trust. Nothing worked. Günsche wouldn’t crack, and didn’t change his statements. The SS man might only have been twenty-eight, but he already had a decade’s service in the death’s-head uniform. He was very familiar with the methods used to break prisoners’ resistance.

Otto Günsche was the son of a police officer. He joined the Hitler Youth at the age of fourteen and joined the SS Leibstandarte in 1934, at the age of seventeen. This SS shock troop contained the elite warriors of the regime. It recruited chiefly on the basis of physical criteria. Officers had to be at least 1.80 metres tall (none of the high-ups in the regime fulfilled that criteria: Hitler was 1.76 metres, Himmler 1.74 metres, and Goebbels 1.65 metres), prove “racial purity” without Jewish blood over several generations, and of course swear fidelity unto death to the principles of Nazism. The following year, to celebrate his eighteenth birthday, Günsche joined the NSDAP. This strapping young man, 1.93 metres tall, blond, broad-shouldered and athletic, soon attracted the attention of his superiors. Very logically, he was chosen to join the SS group responsible for Hitler’s personal security. That was in 1936, when Günsche was nineteen. On 1 March 1943 he became Hitler’s personal aide-de-camp. In that capacity, he followed the Führer through his everyday life. He attended all the military and diplomatic meetings, recorded everything that was said, and executed his orders to the best of his ability. Like Linge, Otto Günsche became one of Hitler’s shadows, and the privileged witness of the last months of his power. When interrogated by the Soviets, he claimed to know exactly how the Führer had taken his life. Like Linge, like Baur: On 30 April 1945, Hitler joined his wife, Eva Braun, in his antechamber in the Führerbunker. They committed suicide. A few moments later, the two bodies were burnt in the gardens of the Chancellery and buried.

But the accounts of the three witnesses did not agree on certain details. Linge heard a shot being fired. Günsche didn’t. Baur claimed to have said his farewells to the Führer at about 6–7 pm, when the two others swore that he had killed himself at about 4 pm. Who was right? Who was lying?

Beria couldn’t afford to make a mistake. Stalin had just relieved him of command of the NKVD. On 29 December 1945, the first Soviet Union spy was replaced by his deputy, Sergei Kruglov. Did this mean that Lavrenti Beria was being sidelined at the end of his bloody career? Was he still a leading figure in the secret services? Certainly, Stalin seemed to be weakening the power of his “Himmler” in the very sensitive sector of state security. But Beria, who had just been given the honorific title of Marshal of the Soviet Union, was an unavoidable presence in the complex equilibrium of Muscovite power. A major piece in the mechanics of repression and surveillance of the country. He was still allowed to keep an eye on all of the secret services as a member of the Politburo and vice-president of the Council of Ministers. Nothing escaped his attention. Certainly not the “Myth” file.

In mid-February 1946 the interrogations began. Methods changed compared to those of SMERSH in May–June 1945. They became more brutal, even extremely brutal.

None of that violence appears in the accounts of the NKVD investigators. Or hardly anything. It’s there between the lines, looking at the times of day chosen for the interrogations. Most of them took place in the middle of the night, between eleven o’clock and five in the morning. Some sessions lasted no longer than two hours, some could extend over six hours at a stretch, or even more.

Breaking the body and the spirit, making the adversary vulnerable, shattering his last resistance, the officers of the Soviet special services had nothing to learn from the Nazis. For years they had been torturing “counter-revolutionaries” and other “enemies” of the people; they had perfected the delicate art of interrogation. Asking the same question over and over again, day after day, or rather night after night, can take the prisoner to the brink of madness, as Hitler’s former valet was about to find out.

This is his account of Hitler’s death: “Hitler withdraws to his antechamber at about 3:45 pm on 30 April 1945. He joins Eva Braun. Linge remained behind the door all the time. A few minutes later he hears the sound of gunfire. He runs to alert Bormann, the Führer’s secretary. Together they opened the door and observed that Hitler and Braun have died. He by bullet, she by poisoning. Then they take the bodies to the garden and burn them.”

Linge’s hope of an easy ride from the Soviets faded very quickly. The Russian investigation was only just getting under way again. That first meeting with Agent Schweitzer lasted only two hours. Just a taster of the nights to come. Whether Hitler’s butler liked it or not, the questions about the dictator’s last days were due to follow.

Six long hours stating the same story over and over again. Linge held out, presenting a version identical to that of the first days of his detention the previous summer. The interrogation had been conducted in Germany. An interpreter officiated throughout the session. The questions resume. This time, he is asked whether at the last minute Goebbels might not have persuaded Hitler to escape. Linge listens and admits that it might have been possible. But a tank would have been required to pierce the curtain of Russian soldiers surrounding the bunker, the former butler explains.

According to him there were still fifty-eight of them. He was sure of it and solemnly declared as much.

Back in his cell, Linge boasted to his cell-mate about the lies he had told during the interrogations. The spy “Bremen” didn’t miss a word and reported the conversation to his superiors: “Linge does not deliver sincere witness statements because he knows that the Russian authorities will not be able to confuse him in his lies. For the simple reason that there are only two people who know the circumstances of the ‘death’ of Hitler: him and Bormann. And Bormann is out of range of the Russians.” At this time Martin Bormann was still being actively sought. In fact he had not survived his attempt to escape from the bunker on 2 May 1945.

Three almost sleepless nights. Linge couldn’t get to sleep in his cell. He came back exhausted from his endless sessions of questioning. And by day the warders kept him from sleeping. It was a rhythm that wasn’t about to stop.

The first cracks in the valet’s depositions. The blows rain down, threats burst his eardrums. For the first time, he returns to his statements, the ones he made the previous day.

From fifty-eight people in the bunker he switches to only twelve that he really saw on the evening of 29–30 April 1945.

The interrogations continue:

On 23 February, 12:30 pm until 4:00 pm.

On 24 February he is allowed a little rest.

On 25 February the night-time sessions resume. From 11:30 pm until 4:00 in the morning.

On 26 February Linge cracks. A week of that treatment has been enough to transform him. When they come and look for him in his cell at 11:00 pm he reacts like a madman and starts screaming. The NKVD agent records the scene in his report.

The Soviet reports never linger on the methods used by the investigators. To find out more, we must turn to the prisoners. Linge recorded some traumatising details of his passage through the Soviet dungeons, particularly concerning physical violence:

Hans Baur, already considerably weakened by his amputation, was subjected to the same treatment. The night-time interrogations continued with the same recurring question: is Hitler dead?

At first the German pilot attempted to maintain a dignified composure. He even complained of the comfort of his new prison, and asked to be taken back to the Lubyanka. A request that was obviously refused. Instead, they shouted at him: “You’re lying! You’re lying! You’re lying!” Exhausted and frightened, Baur admitted that in fact he was lying. He didn’t know which lie he had told, but he admitted everything. He had only one wish: for everything to stop.

The threat had its effect. The pilot dropped his mask.

Hitler’s suicide? He wasn’t there.

The discovery of the lifeless corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun in the antechamber of the bunker? He wasn’t there. The cremation of the two bodies in the garden? He wasn’t there.

Why these repeated absences at the most dramatic moment in the life of the man he had served so devotedly?

Baur no longer tried to put a brave face on his actions. He presented them as they were, warts and all.

As to the details about Hitler’s death, he learned them only later on. “It was on 22 or 23 October 1945 in Poznan prisoner of war camp.” Two guards from Hitler’s personal security staff gave him the information, he said. Baur was quick to tell his questioners the names of those two soldiers: “They were Bergmueller and Höfbeck.”

The Soviets still doubted the veracity of Baur’s declarations. They knew that Hitler had personally given orders to burn his body after his suicide, and to make sure that no one would ever be able to find them. But Baur hadn’t done anything.

Could they trust him?

Baur’s statements did not agree at all with those of Linge or Günsche.

Günsche repeated the same information at each of his interrogations. Hitler killed himself on 30 April 1945 at about 4:00 pm. It was Linge who found him. On the other hand, when he was only a few metres away from Hitler’s antechamber, Günsche didn’t hear gunfire. At that precise moment, however, there was no noise in the bunker, just the vibrations of the ventilation system. How could the young SS man not have heard the report?

In the Russian camp, the results of the interrogations were dissected, analysed, and compared.

Two major differences struck them immediately: the time of the suicide.

Between 3:00 and 4:00 pm for Linge and Günsche.

Between 7:00 and 9:00 pm for Baur.

The cause of death:

By firearm for Linge and Baur.

Uncertain for Günsche.

After a month of interrogations, they had to admit that the “Myth” file was not getting anywhere. Doubts persisted, indeed they flourished.

At this stage, for the Soviet secret services, Hitler’s death remained mysterious.

As to the body they had found, was it his? If so, why did the forensic examiners not notice the impact of a bullet to the head? Unless Linge and Baur were lying?