The Death of Hitler: The Final Word

MOSCOW, MARCH 2017

We have only two days. That’s all the Russian authorities have granted us. Two days to carry out a forensic examination. We had to fight to get even this. “Haven’t you ever thought of carrying out scientific tests on Hitler’s human remains? Or rather the remains that are potentially those of Hitler?” Alexander Orlov, our contact at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, didn’t expect these questions. It was last December. He got in touch with us again just to know how we had got on with the FSB archives. He’d hoped he was done with us. The teeth, the skull and confidential files, wasn’t that enough? “We want to know once and for all, without the slightest doubt…” He’s heard these arguments so often, from so many journalists, historians, even scientists. Tests, new technology, with no damage done to the skull or the teeth. Alexander speaks good French. But when he finds himself in a stressful situation, he prefers to reply in his mother tongue, Russian. Lana resumes the conversation. Alexander resists. He claims he doesn’t know.

Silence. Then his voice darkened all of a sudden: “I’ve got it. I’ll give you an answer soon…”

Our reply came in early March. It was: “Two days! One day per archive. Come at the end of the month.”

That worked out perfectly. We had also just got the green light for the military archives. We’d be able to kill two birds with one stone.

Dr. Philippe Charlier would be joining us for those important two days. The French forensic examiner and archaeo-anthropologist was the obvious choice for us. In just a few years, this scientist had built up a solid reputation for penetrating historical mysteries. The most famous “murderers” in history speak beneath his skilful fingers. Poison, blade, pistol, nothing escapes him. His accomplishments impress his peers, but also the wider public all over the world. The kings whose remains have passed through his hands include France’s Henry IV, Saint Louis, Richard the Lionheart, and legendary figures like Joan of Arc, and the tribune of the French Revolution, the terrible Robespierre. Philippe Charlier liked to publish the studies of his “patients” in the world’s finest scientific journals. A youthful man in his forties, enthusiastic, an adventurer (he loved to travel to the remotest spots on the planet to practise his skill), he combined popularisation with a scrupulous respect for classical scientific principles. Hardly surprising that the media saw him as an “Indiana Jones of the graveyards,” and passed on in detail each of his new historical autopsies. No way would he be willing to miss the Hitler file.

Two days, then. One day for the skull in the GARF Archives and one more for the teeth in the company of the shady spies of the FSB. GARF and the TsA FSB dragged their feet as they usually did, and talked terms. They all reacted in the same way: “Our country is drowning in forensic specialists. We don’t need a foreigner.” And they were perfectly right. A Russian would carry out the tests just as seriously, we had no doubt of that. And yet, out of concern for neutrality, as far as we were concerned what was needed was the opinion of a foreign scientist. To our greater surprise, the argument was accepted quite quickly. To avoid any suspicion or pressure from the Russians, we were given permission for the French doctor of our choice to intervene. We just had to find the dates that would satisfy everyone. Those would be 29 and 30 March.

Moscow, 28 March. I have twenty-four hours to check that everything will be ready for Dr. Charlier’s arrival. The Russian capital is calmer than usual. The walls of the Kremlin no longer hum with the babbling of groups of tourists. Lenin’s tomb is empty of the devotees of the Communist mummy. In the square are dozens of police officers, truncheons visible, regulation grey fur hats decorated with the insignia of the forces of law and order. They have the closed faces of people who have been given strict instructions. Two hours earlier, a demonstration of opponents of the regime met in the city centre. An insult to Putin. The state powers didn’t hold back, and arrested seven hundred demonstrators. The pictures were shown on the news channels all around the world. Russia was going through a major economic and political crisis unprecedented over the past ten years. The country is getting tougher and turning in on itself. Not the optimum conditions in which to investigate the Hitler file. At best, the authorities have neither the time nor the energy to answer our questions; at worst, they see us as a new source of problems. I was barely surprised when I saw Lana in the café where we used to work. Her features were drawn and her gaze uneasy. She didn’t have to open her mouth. I understood. They’d just cancelled! Not all of them. Just the TsA FSB. Without giving a reason or justifying themselves. That left us with GARF, the state archives with their bit of skull. They hadn’t changed their minds. Not yet.

The people in charge of GARF have stopped replying. We’ve been waiting in the entrance hall for an hour. It’s 3:00 pm on 29 March, and Philippe Charlier’s plane has just landed at the international airport of Sheremetyevo, an hour away from the centre of Moscow. Yesterday, Alexander Orlov had personally intervened on behalf of Lana. FSB cancelled, “date doesn’t work,” but not GARF. “Come on, they’re waiting for you.” Had they really said that? I ask Lana the question one more time. She sighs: “He said exactly those words.” So, the people in charge of the state archives know that we’re here, and that a French expert has come specially from Paris to examine the bit of skull, the one they keep in a miserable little computer-disk box! So why is no one replying to us? Even our passes aren’t ready. We confirmed a meeting about the skull with Dr. Charlier. The teeth would be later, another time. “When?” he had worried, rightly. Soon. We were using the same methods as the Russian authorities: vagueness and hope. Philippe Charlier reassured us immediately. “Don’t worry, I’ll find a window when the time comes, don’t you worry about that. I’m really interested in the project; you can count on me. But we’re okay about the skull?” In principle, yes. But we’re seething with rage in an empty waiting room. Do they even know that we’re here? Are they playing with our nerves for fun? Or is it just an illustration of the atavistic incompetence of the post-Soviet bureaucracy?

A woman in her sixties is sitting behind the only counter in the room. She’s the one who issues the passes. An oh-so important job that gives her the perverse opportunity to be as rude as she wishes, without the visitors to GARF daring to fight back. Right now she is eating a kebab and reading a glossy magazine without paying us the slightest attention. “They’re going to phone and tell her to prepare our documents,” Lana guesses, trying to remain optimistic. “It’s only a matter of minutes.” Nikolai Vladimirsev, the archivist with the waxy complexion, finally decides to come and save us. He has brought out the passes. The lady finished her sandwich long ago, and has started reading another magazine. She doesn’t even look up when we leave. Stay calm and polite, it’s all only a test. It doesn’t matter, because the skull awaits our forensic examination. Philippe Charlier should be joining us in about half an hour. We just have time to check that everything has been put in place. “The skull isn’t ready?” I can’t believe what Nikolai has just told us. And yet he confirms as much with his usual nonchalance. Nothing has been prepared. His opal eyes have never looked as bright as they do right now. “We will wait for Dr. Charlier before we put everything in place,” he goes on as we cross the courtyard of GARF towards the head office. “Nothing will begin before he gets here. And for your information, everything must be finished before the offices close at 5:30.”

Here we are again in this room where we were shown the skull last year. Only the decorations on the walls have changed. Instead of the revolutionary posters from 1917, a series of black-and-white photographs of the imperial family, the family of Nicholas II, the last tsar of Mother Russia. Should we see this as a desire on the part of the Russian regime to bring back the country’s imperialist past? I don’t dare to elaborate on this ideological choice in the company of Nikolai, and even less of Dina Nokhotovich, who has just joined us. The head of the department of the secret collection clearly didn’t expect to see us again. As usual, her manners are dictated by her mood. It’s late afternoon, and Dina seems irritable and doesn’t respond to our greetings. I recognise the big shoe box that holds the bones attributed to Hitler. It protrudes slightly from the little supermarket trolley that Nikolai never takes his eyes off. The trolley has been placed carefully at the end of the table. The same big wooden table. “Is there any chance of opening the box?” Lana translates my request. Neither of the two archivists replies. As if they can’t hear her, or no longer understand Russian. At last Nikolai reacts. Without a word, he sits down beside his little trolley, folds his arms defiantly and looks us up and down. The atmosphere of our meeting is becoming awkward. The silence is heavy. Lana breaks it. “Isn’t Larisa, your director, going to join us?” Anxious now, we even find ourselves wishing she was there. Clearly Dina and Nikolai aren’t keen on our forensic project. We need to know if this is merely a case of insubordination, two clerks uneasy with the idea of some strangers manhandling their “treasure.” Or, more generally, if the directors of GARF have found their own way of obstructing our work.

Philippe Charlier has just called us. He’s at reception, opposite the woman with the newspaper. She clearly doesn’t want to let him in. Nikolai agrees to move. Very slowly, he adjusts his hat on his sparse, straw-coloured hair, slips on his coat and comes with me. Imperturbably he greets the French expert with a frosty “ztrastvuyte” (hello). I tell Dr. Charlier about the complexity of the situation. I do so discreetly, because French is a language that many Russians understand, having learned it at school. In the Soviet era, French often replaced English as a compulsory foreign language. And Nikolai is easily old enough to have been a schoolboy under the hammer and sickle. “I understand, I’ll adapt,” the doctor murmurs. “I’m used to it.” Some positive vibes at last. Philippe Charlier has plenty of those. He adds, entering the room where Lana and Dina are waiting for us: “I’m going to have access to the skull. And that in itself is extraordinary.”

We think we know why our contacts are being so frosty. A big thank you to Professor Nicholas (known as Nick) Bellantoni of Connecticut University. That American professor of archaeology examined the skull in 2009 and declared that it belonged to a young woman! As we were given to understand at our first meeting with GARF staff last year, his little adventure traumatised Dina and Nikolai. Since that scandal, no scientist has been allowed anywhere near the human fragments. Philippe Charlier is the first. And he is kept under close attention. Nikolai stands a few centimetres away from him, ready to intervene if necessary.

First stage: observation. The French forensic expert picks up the diskette box holding the bit of skull. He brings it to his face and examines it from every possible angle. Nikolai opens his mouth and holds his hands out in front of him as if in a reflex. He is outraged. Normally he is the only one allowed to touch this little box. Dina pulls a face to express her own disapproval. Philippe Charlier is oblivious. All of his attention is focused on the bones. His confident attitude disconcerts the Russian archivists, who don’t dare to oppose him. For now…

“The first important thing you need to know is that it’s impossible to determine the sex of this skull just with a visual analysis.” The scientist speaks without hesitation. He goes on: “Does it belong to a man or a woman? No one can say with any certainty. It seems to me risky at best to make a diagnosis on such tiny fragments of bone. We have only the back left-hand part of the skull at our disposal. That part never gives a clue about its sex. I’m categorical on the matter.” In just a few minutes, Philippe Charlier has demolished part of his American colleague’s theory. Bellantoni claimed that the structure of the bones, too fine, too fragile, did not correspond to those of an adult male. “Wrong!” The Frenchman has no doubt. “On a skeleton, the diagnosis of sex is performed only on the pelvis. It’s unthinkable with a skull, a mandible, or a femur. And you would need to have the whole skull. Which is not really the case here.” And the age? Bellantoni reached the conclusion that the skull was that of someone aged between twenty and forty. But Hitler was fifty-six. How did the American get there? “He must have based his theory on the degree of closure of the sutures at the level of the skull.” Quite correct. In many interviews, the archaeologist from Connecticut makes no secret of his reasoning. It is based on the sutures that hold the plates of the skull together. This is what Nick Bellantoni says in a video shot by his university in Connecticut “Normally, as you age, they close down […], and these are wide open. An individual, I would have expected, twenty to forty years old.”[52] Philippe Charlier is able to study the sutures in question very closely. “I wouldn’t risk giving an age to a bone like this based only on the gap in the sutures. They vary so much between one individual and another. It’s possible that my sutures are completely closed like those of an old person, while my grandmother’s were open when she died. I insist, you can’t give the age of this skull on the basis of the sutures. Particularly when you only have a third of the whole of the skull. It doesn’t hold up.”

“Niet!” Dina isn’t happy. “Niet!” Nikolai agrees. Lana argues: we’ve got permission. “Niettt!” Dr. Charlier was about to put his sterile gloves on. He wanted them to open the diskette box for him so that he could take out the piece of skull. Lana had translated the question with a certain restlessness. The reply from the two archivists was as cold as a Siberian winter. We’re not opening it. Certainly not for a foreign scientist or some journalists. Dina says it again, on the brink of rudeness. Negotiation is no longer an option. The temperature in the room is starting to rise. Philippe Charlier intervenes calmly: “It doesn’t matter. We’ll do it without. Can I go on observing the skull anyway?” Nikolai didn’t expect such a calm reaction. The scientist turns towards him. He is a good head taller. “Just look, I won’t touch.” Dina finally says, “Da.”

“Then I will continue my observations. I will take my time, and too bad if they hoped to go home early this evening.” Lana takes advantage of the moment to escape into the corridor and call Alexander Orlov for help. After ten rings he finally picks up. The situation, the refusal, the obstacles erected by the archivists, Lana lets her distress spill out. Alexander is getting weary. He replies that there’s no longer anything he can do for us. “Sort yourselves out!”

It’s nearly six o’clock. Nikolai consults his watch. He taps his foot impatiently. The French expert feels the tension mounting around him. Unflappable, he taps all the information he has managed to glean into his computer. It will help him to write his report. Ultra-high-definition photographs of the skull and all the objects on the table will complete his work and allow him to verify his forensic examination. “Vascular orifice (right-hand unilateral parietal foramen), star-shaped loss of substance on the left parietal…” When he is working, the expert on the dead has no interest in the living people around him. Not even the crafty Russian archivists. “Look at this, for example, it’s very interesting…” He points at an orifice perfectly visible on the top of the skull. “This is clearly a bullet wound. The projectile passed through the head from side to side and emerged at the level of the parietal bone. This is an exit wound, not an entry wound. Its shape is typical, splayed towards the outside. It is about 6 millimetres wide. That isn’t to say that the calibre of the ammunition was 6 mm. I can’t establish a diagnosis of the calibre on the basis of an exit wound. The bullet could easily have fragmented or been deformed.” On the other hand, what seems certain in his eyes is the moment when the bullet went off. “It was fired at a cool, damp bone,” he confirms. If it is Hitler’s skull, the bullet was fired either while he was alive, or shortly after his death.

The investigation is proceeding at a crazy pace. Now the forensic expert’s attention is drawn by blackish traces on the skull. “These are residues of the burial medium, definitely soil. You can also see traces of carbonisation. They prove that it has undergone prolonged thermal exposure. This person was burnt at a very high temperature.” According to the survivors of the bunker, almost two hundred litres of petrol were used. “That’s perfectly consistent,” Charlier says. “Burning a body is very difficult. To make a human corpse disappear completely, it would take at least 100 kilos of wood or several hundred litres of petrol. A body is full of moisture. Hence, in many cases, the heterogeneity of the carbonisation.”

Nikolai listens as if he understands every word uttered in French. He almost relaxes. A hint of admiration appears in his eyes. Behind him, the whole of the Hitler file has stayed in the caddy. I can’t help consulting those dusty old documents again. I can easily decipher the signatures of the Soviet rulers of the time. Names that have become familiar to me from having studied them so much: Beria, “Stalin’s no. 1 cop,” Molotov the diplomat, Abakumov the ambitious spy… I’m looking for one passage in particular. The one concerning an interrogation of Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet. The report dates from 27 February 1946. It’s typed and signed by the Nazi prisoner at the bottom of each page. I show it to Philippe Charlier.

The description of the wound broadly corresponds to the visual examination carried out by Charlier. If at this stage it remains impossible to determine the identity of the skull, the evidence agrees. Even better, the valet’s witness statement sheds new light on the matter for the forensic examiner. Notably the fact that the skull remained intact in spite of the shot. “If he really fired into his right temple, the exit of the bullet through the left parietal seems logical. And we have a way of knowing whether Linge lied or not. We can in fact check the hypothesis of a shot fired in the mouth.” What? “Thanks to the teeth! If we find traces of powder on the teeth or the gums, it’s a good argument in favour of an intrabuccal shot having been fired.” Those famous teeth which are in the archives of the FSB, and to which access has, for the time being, been delayed.

Dina has had enough, she wants to leave. It’s 6:30 pm; we’ve overshot closing time at GARF by half an hour! “Can we come back tomorrow? And continue with the analysis of the skull as well as the pieces of sofa?” Lana shouldn’t have spoken. Her question irritates the old archivist. “No! You have no authorisation for tomorrow. Finish for today. I will leave you for another few minutes.”

Philippe Charlier doesn’t understand a word of Russian, and hasn’t grasped the exchange between the two women. The archivist’s rude tone of voice tells him nonetheless that the situation is deteriorating. But he keeps his calm and turns his attention to the other pieces of the puzzle set out in front of him. Apart from the bit of skull, he is able to observe the wooden structures of the sofa, including the head-rests. As well as the photographic report from the time of the counter-inquiry into Hitler’s suicide in April–May 1946. This series of black-and-white photographs that we saw last year shows the site of the suicide, with traces of blood on the sofa and the wall. “We can’t talk about blood traces,” Charlier says prudently. “At this stage we can only talk about traces of blackish drips.” More than half a century has passed, and they still appear on the light-coloured wood, probably pine, of Hitler’s sofa. The passing of time and GARF’s very poor conservation conditions have not erased them. If these are authentic pieces and not a trick perpetrated by the Russian secret services. Anything is possible in this inquiry, including the worst. “I think it would be difficult to make such a forgery,” Philippe Charlier reckons. “All of these traces can also be found identically in the photographs from 1946. It would demonstrate astonishing counterfeiting skill if it was a copy.” Lana tells Charlier: “You can touch them if you like, you can handle them; look here, where there are traces of…” The forensic expert utters a cry as he sees the journalist bringing her hand towards the object. “No! Don’t touch! You’ll contaminate this piece of evidence with your DNA.” Lana apologises with an embarrassed laugh. “That’s exactly what you mustn’t do,” Charlier says apologetically. “And it’s bound to have happened several times. That’s why I’m not expecting much from these bits of sofa. They have been badly preserved in non-sterilised fabric. Plainly this wood has been touched by numerous hands, directly, without protective gloves. And that’s without the spittle that many observers have deposited on them. The only DNA that one would find here will be from a few minutes ago. Hitler’s will have disappeared long ago.” Then, after a moment’s thought, he goes on: “We can hope for nothing from that side. Unless…”

While he leans over them, keeping a respectable distance (without running the risk of adding his own DNA by tiny drops of sweat or saliva) from one of the pieces of sofa, the forensic expert has another idea. He turns his attention towards the photographs from the Soviet inquiry. Then back to the pieces of evidence. That back-and-forth movement speeds up. He picks up one of the chairs around the table and begins a strange demonstration. “This is very interesting. Exciting. Look…” His enthusiasm even communicates itself to the two archivists, who are drawn to him in spite of themselves.

“Let’s imagine that the victim is on this chair. He has just fired a bullet into his skull. His head is on the head rest, the blood flows and bounces off the floor, causing splashes. He talks quickly, waving his hands around. Wounds to the head always bleed abundantly. The blood must have flowed in large quantities, even for only a few minutes, the few minutes between the shot and Bormann and Linge’s arrival in the antechamber. The blood spread across the floor, thick, heavy, dark, whether on the concrete or on a carpet. Carpet or concrete, it doesn’t really matter. There will have been so much blood that a puddle has formed, and the drops that are still falling splash the sofa, but not just anywhere: under the sofa. And here are those splashes!” On one of the pieces of the sofa tiny dark stains mingle with the natural veins of the wood. Sometimes, depending on the lighting, they almost disappear. The scene of the crime, of the suicide to be precise, is coming into focus. Does Charlier’s hypothesis agree with the witness statements? Linge, the valet, and Günsche, the personal aide-de-camp, came into the room. They told the Soviet investigators who had taken them prisoner what they saw.

After the liberation of the Soviet camps in 1955, Linge’s interminable interrogation sessions in the Russian prisons would resume: “‘How much blood sprayed on the carpet?’ ‘How far from Hitler’s foot did the pool of blood extend?’ ‘Where was his pistol exactly?’ ‘Which pistol did he use?’ and ‘How and where was he sitting exactly?’ These were some of the stereotyped, endlessly repeated questions I was obliged to answer.”[53]

Philippe Charlier is able to give those answers. Or at least some of them. He abandons the pieces of wood, which are unusable for DNA tests, and comes back towards the bit of skull. He picks up the box. He plays with the light to get a better look at the dark traces that cover part of it. “As I thought,” he says under his breath, as if talking to himself. “These are not organic remains from an individual. No skin or muscle. It’s all been burned. I clearly see traces of carbonisation. They prove that it has undergone prolonged thermal exposure.” The expert is more interested in other stains. “I think we are looking at traces of soil here. Perhaps even traces of corrosion or rust. Do we know where the skull was discovered?”

Thanks to the files found in the archives, we know quite precisely.

Go seven decades into the past–to 30 May 1946. Thirteen months after Hitler’s suicide, the area around the Chancellery in Berlin was subjected to a new inspection, organised within the top-secret context of the “Myth” file, launched on 12 January 1946 by Beria’s successor in Internal Affairs, Sergei Kruglov. Teams of investigators brought in especially from Moscow got to work in the Führer’s headquarters. They had received very precise orders from their superiors:

The principal goal of the teams of the Ministry of Internal Affairs was to find the missing part of the body found in May 1945. In their autopsy report dated 8 May 1945, the forensic examiners had recorded the absence of the back left-hand part of the head. Very quickly, in May 1946, two pieces of skull were disinterred in the garden, three metres from the entrance to the Führerbunker. Precisely where the alleged bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun had been found on 4 May 1945. One of the pieces had been pierced by a bullet. Might that fragment of bone not be the missing piece of the puzzle? In that case, the theory of suicide by poison was seriously weakened. What if it was true that Hitler had committed suicide not with cyanide but with a bullet? The discovery of these two bits of skull might put an end to speculations about his death. For that to happen, it was enough to check that the bones belonged to the corpse attributed to Hitler. Nothing could be simpler, since the Ministry of Internal Affairs was fully supportive of the inquiry. Except that the corpse in question was still kept under the jealous surveillance of the Ministry of Defence.

For several months, the head of Soviet counter-espionage, Viktor Abakumov, had enjoyed almost total impunity in the chain of command of the USSR. Stalin had made him his new right-hand man. Abakumov took advantage of the fact to act as he saw fit. So on his own initiative, on 21 February 1946, the SMERSH officers based in Germany moved the corpses not only of Hitler, but also of Eva Braun, of the Goebbels family (parents and children) as well as that of General Krebs. Until now these bodies had been buried in a wood near the little town of Rathenow. No justification was given at the time to the Soviet authorities.

Why move such important corpses? Abakumov did this to keep control of his “trophy.” The headquarters of SMERSH in Magdeburg, 150 kilometres south-west of Berlin, offered perfect protection against the “snoopers” of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It was quite natural for the bodies to be moved there. It was most important that they should not be taken to the Berlin hospital in Bunch for a new autopsy.

The Kremlin supported Abakumov, because a few weeks later he was appointed Minister of State Security with the rank of general. Then he was appointed a member of the committee of the Politburo of the Soviet Communist Party, in charge of legal affairs. At the age of only thirty-eight, he was not only untouchable but also terribly dangerous for anyone daring to challenge him. A position that he planned to exploit.

The request by the “Myth” file team to perform a second autopsy on the bodies moved to Magdeburg was rejected out of hand by counter-espionage. But the directives of the Ministry of Internal Affairs did not lack clarity. Lieutenant Colonel Klausen, in charge of the inquiry in Berlin, brought with him a mission order that he thought was sufficient.

This mission letter did not make enough of an impression on the SMERSH agents. They were answerable to the Ministry of Defence and had nothing to do with the other ministries. Because of their refusal, no one would ever be able to compare the two fragments of skull with the rest of the male corpse, either in 1946 or in any other year. Never. In spring 1970 all the bodies buried in Magdeburg and under the control of counter-espionage were definitively destroyed. This decision was taken at the highest level of the state by one Yuri Andropov, future leader of the Soviet Union (from 1982 until 1984). In 1970, Andropov already occupied a key post in the nexus of the country’s secret services. He was the all-powerful “President of the Committee of State Security in the Council of Ministers of the USSR.” In short, the man was in charge of all the Soviet spies. No “special” operation could be decided without his agreement. Like the one code-named “Archive,” for example.

Why decide twenty-five years after the fall of the Third Reich to destroy these skeletons? Did the Kremlin fear that the state secret might one day be revealed and that Hitler’s body, if it was indeed his, might fall into the hands of the Western Allies? Or, more simply, did the Soviet rulers want to move on from an old story and get rid of defeated enemies once and for all? Moscow would not have to justify its act, because it was secret.

A colonel from the Special Department of the KGB ran this highly sensitive and confidential mission. In the early 1970s, Europe was in a state of major geopolitical tension. The German zone under Soviet administration had declared its independence from the rest of Germany in 1949. It took the name GDR, the German Democratic Republic, and obeyed the orders of Moscow. This was the era of the bipolar world (on one side the capitalist camp dominated by the United States, on the other the Communist camp led by the USSR), and the fear of a Third World War. Officially, Moscow continued to deny that it was in possession of Hitler’s body. Operation “Archive” intervened in this complex geopolitical context. Everything had to be totally secret. As usual, the Kremlin was suspicious of everyone, first of all its own men. Precise instructions had been issued in this spirit.

It is rare to be able to consult such a Soviet secret services document. Even though it is over seventy years old, it remains confidential. It is no coincidence that it is preserved today in the archives of the FSB (ex-KGB). It shows us the internal working of a special operation with the use of “legends,” scenarios intended to offer a credible cover to spies. What is surprising in the present case is that this “legend” was intended to fool soldiers of the USSR.

Operation “Archive” was officially taken to its conclusion. The alleged bodies of Hitler and his inner circle, Eva Braun, the Goebbels family, and General Krebs, have been definitively destroyed. At least that is the version provided by the Soviet secret services and validated even today by the Russian authorities. Here is that report in its entirety:

As in the days of SMERSH and the NKVD, quarrels between different Russian administrations continue even today. The flag has changed, but not the mentalities. As proof of this, will our authorisations to study the skull carry much weight with the two GARF archivists? Philippe Charlier consults the photographs of the Chancellery garden, taken in May 1946 when the fragments of skull were brought to light. A pile of metal debris covers ground violently ripped open by the artillery fire of the battle of Berlin. A small cross drawn in pencil on the photograph indicates the exact place where the two bits of skull were found. Just outside the entrance to the bunker. It was only later that the Russian scientists put the two fragments together to make one. The one archived in the offices of GARF.

“So these bones were buried under rubble in the middle of large numbers of metal objects…. This is important information. Remind me how long this bit of skull has been under the ground?” Each piece of information has its own importance. “Buried for over a year in this ferrous pool? That would be a match. At any rate, the scenario is not out of the question,” Charlier reflects. “In plain terms, the bits of skull that we have in front of us show every sign of having been buried for a long time in corrosive ground.”

Those are the positive points. Now for the negative ones.

“Isn’t handling the skull under your surveillance exactly what we came here to do?” Philippe Charlier tries to persuade the archivists in his turn. Dina is unwilling to yield. She asks Nikolai. He replies by picking up the box holding the piece of skull. “Another time,” he says without looking at us. When? Tomorrow? Soon? It’s Dina’s turn to speak: “We don’t know if we will have time to receive you. You will need a new authorisation.” But we’ve got it! Lana insists. Nikolai has already left with his trolley. He almost flees into the corridor. It is 8:00 in the evening. We have abused their patience quite enough.

BERLIN, 30 MAY 1946

Operation “Myth” was under threat. The vast counter-inquiry into Hitler’s death faced a considerable obstacle: the Ministry of State Security of the USSR (MGB), under Viktor Abakumov. Abakumov’s representative in Germany, Lieutenant General Zelenin, ordered his staff to oppose head-on the men sent to Berlin by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD). The investigators had not expected such hostility. They had to face up to the facts: their minister, Sergei Kruglov, carried little weight in the face of Stalin’s right-hand man, the dangerous Abakumov. More than five months of investigations and muscular interrogation to end here… When the discovery of two fragments of skull outside Hitler’s bunker had promised so much.

The Nazi prisoners who had witnessed the Führer’s final moments also felt that something strange was happening. Seven of them had been transferred from their Moscow cell to Berlin. Among them, the usual trio of SS men from Hitler’s inner circle: Heinz Linge, the valet, Hans Baur, the pilot, and Otto Günsche, the aide-de-camp. The only one missing from this line-up was SS General Rattenhuber. And for the good reason that he was in the hands of the MGB. Suspecting that the men from the Ministry of State Security would reply in the negative, the men from the Ministry of Internal Affairs had not even requested his transfer to Berlin. So it was without Rattenhuber that the last witnesses of Hitler’s death were sent to the German capital. This was on 26 April 1946. They had been dragged from the Butyrka prison and thrown on a special train bound for the city of Brest, formerly Brest-Litovsk, in the far west of the USSR, near the Polish border. From there, they had joined another equally secret railway convoy to Berlin. Their journey lasted over a week. To avoid any contact between them, each inmate was placed in isolation in a wagon, unaware of the presence of the others. Years later, after his release from Soviet camps in 1955, Linge would describe that uncomfortable journey: “About a year after the end of the war I was thrust into a barred railway wagon and transported like some wild animal back to Berlin.”[54] Hans Baur was concerned about the quality of the food: “We travelled for nine days, and during that time our daily rations consisted of some brownish water from the locomotive, half a salt herring and about a pound of bread. We arrived–in Berlin!–half starved.”[55]

In the German capital they were immediately locked up in the former women’s prison in Lichtenberg. Hans Baur: “We thought that we knew a thing or two about bad prison conditions, but Berlin-Lichtenberg prison under the Russians beat the lot. The warders were sadists who took pleasure in beating up their prisoners. One day my cell door was wrenched open and I was beaten up and left half-unconscious on the floor–vaguely I heard through a mist of pain that it was because I had been sitting on the edge of my bed.”[56] It was no coincidence that the blows and the humiliations were resumed worse than ever during the former SS men’s stay in Berlin. The Russian officers had been ordered to maintain total pressure so as to break any possible psychological resistance. The prisoners were to be made to cooperate unconditionally, because if they were here it was to resolve one of the last mysteries of the end of the war: the identification of the Führer’s body. A Soviet officer asked Baur to stay prepared: “He told me that the bodies of Hitler and his wife had not been burnt at all, but preserved, and that I had been brought to Berlin to identify them.”[57] But nothing happened as planned. At the last moment, everything was cancelled. “Actually I was never called upon to inspect any body,” Hitler’s personal pilot notes. And for good reason: Abakumov, the Minister of State Security, was opposed to the idea.

What was to be done? Was the group from the Ministry of Internal Affairs to return to Moscow and confess to Stalin that they had been unable to fulfil their mission? Kruglov, and through him Beria, would never recover. They had to get around the “wall” erected by Abakumov and pursue the investigations. For want of access to the body, the team from operation “Myth” took out their fury on the prisoners they had brought from Moscow. The investigators knew they were playing their final cards. In a few days they would have to write their definitive report and pass it on to the highest level of the Kremlin. Their careers were now at stake. Without waiting, they organised new interrogations and confrontations between the key witnesses as well as reconstructions in the bunker. They called them in one by one. In emergency situations such as this, records were written down directly in German and by hand. As usual, the austere and soldierly Günsche refused to be intimidated. As a field-based SS man used to combat, Hitler’s former aide-de-camp barely unclenched his teeth.

To the same question, Linge, the valet, replied like Günsche:

When his turn came, air force general Hans Baur, apparently more tense than the others, was much more forthcoming:

The investigators knew that they wouldn’t be able to interview Rattenhuber, Abakumov’s men would never accept it. Luckily, Baur was frail and a physically unwell man. He had never recovered from the loss of his right leg after his attempted escape from the bunker in early May 1945. His mental state was hardly any better. The Soviet informers who shared his cell systematically gave an account of the airman’s mental decline. For the Russian officers, Baur was easy prey. If there was any secret surrounding the dictator’s death, it would be hard for him to conceal it from them. To make him confess, the Soviets would tell a lie to get at the truth.

Although he didn’t know it, Baur had just put his finger on one of the main doubts of the Russian investigators: the theory of a lookalike! After the fall of Berlin on 2 May 1945, rumours of a “fake Hitler” rapidly circulated around the world. Like any good dictator, would the master of Nazi Germany not have had lookalikes at his disposal to take his place if there was a risk of an assassination attempt? Other dictators often resorted to that strategy. Including Stalin, with his famous “doubles.”

But Baur denied the existence of another “Hitler.” He had never heard of one, he swore. The investigators would take pleasure in destroying what remained of the pilot’s confidence. Hans Höfbeck was a simple Untersturmführer SS, and one of the seven key witnesses transferred from Moscow to Berlin. He too was in the bunker on 30 April 1945, as a member of Hitler’s personal guard. He had been appointed head of the protection service of the Führer’s shelters. What Baur didn’t know was that this NCO had revealed the existence of a double of Hitler in the bunker. A confrontation between Höfbeck and Baur was organised.

Checking that the Nazis did not organise a fake death of Hitler by burning a lookalike: it was all that the Russians could think about. Baur’s denials were not enough to convince them otherwise. To rule on the authenticity of the body found in May 1945 in the garden of the Führerbunker, they tried to recover as many of Hitler’s physical details as possible. Identifying the corpse of Josef Goebbels had not been a problem. With his easily recognisable physical deformity (his right leg was several centimetres shorter than his left as the result of osteomyelitis in childhood), no controversy was possible. For the Führer, nothing so simple. In May 1946, no known deformation had been proven. But you never know. Perhaps his entourage was aware of a detail that would change everything? Hans Baur was interrogated along those lines:

Günsche gave the Soviet officers the same answer: he had no idea of any physical peculiarity:

While Baur and Günsche were subjected to torrents of questions in secret rooms, a special treatment was reserved for Linge. Since he had been the first to discover Hitler’s lifeless body in his antechamber, he was asked to go into great detail about what he had seen on 30 April 1945. But this time he would tell the story on the exact spot, inside the bunker. That way the slightest incoherence could be unmasked. He was led to the ruins of the New Reich Chancellery where a large number of Russian officers awaited him, including Marshal Sokolovsky, the commander-in-chief of the Soviet-occupied zone in Germany.

To make his account clearer, Linge was invited to draw a plan of Hitler’s apartments. The valet carefully obliged.

After Linge’s visit, Hitler’s office was attacked by Soviet criminal investigators. They were looking for clues and particularly for blood. Among them, one man particularly took his time. His name was Piotr Sergeyevich Semenovsky. This sixty-four-year-old doctor was something of a celebrity in the USSR. A graduate of the prestigious university of Tartu in present-day Estonia, perfectly bilingual in Russian and German, he enjoyed considerable prestige in his country. His reputation must have gone beyond the borders of Russia, as he was elected an honorary member of the International Institute of Anthropology in Paris. Brilliant, efficient, and well known for the strength of his character, he invented a method of classification of fingerprints. His work was greatly appreciated by the Soviet regime, which was keen to keep the best possible records of its own citizens. When the Ministry of Internal Affairs summoned him on a secret mission, Semenovsky did not hesitate for a second. Looking for Hitler was a mission that was a match for his talent. A year had passed between the date of Hitler’s alleged suicide and Semenovsky’s inspection in 1946. Dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of soldiers and other Soviet officials had already contaminated the scene of the crime. A disaster for any decent criminal investigator. In the bunker itself, Semenovsky tore his hair out. Of course, he had suspected the difficulty of his mission and the conditions in which he would be working. But was he in a position to complain? Even he, the gold standard of scientific policing in Stalin’s regime, did not have the right to make a mistake without paying the price immediately. Obey and succeed. Meticulously, the old doctor paced the room. The antechamber measured only a few square metres, barely ten or so. His eyes became accustomed to the poor lighting. He was given the records of Linge’s interrogations. Not all of them. Only the ones that might help him understand. The place where Hitler had been on the sofa, the position in which his body was lying, where the shot had been fired… blood, he had to find blood. The forensic expert looked. If there had been suicide by bullet, there would have to be blood. The sofa had not been stolen or destroyed. A stroke of luck. Semenovsky ordered the head-rests to be removed. Dark trickles were perfectly visible. He thought he could spot bloodstains on the walls as well. These were not splashes caused by the bullet to the head, but traces left when the body was being moved. The expert mentally reconstructed the scene. The dictator’s body, still warm and bleeding copiously. Yes, it was wrapped in a blanket, but that was quickly drenched in blood. The blood dripped onto the floor and against the walls. Semenovsky left the antechamber, pushing aside the soldiers on either side of him. He could no longer see them, absorbed as he was by the past. He almost closed his eyes to concentrate better. It was 30 April 1945, when the last of the Führer’s loyal followers carried the body to the garden. Semenovsky did find some blood, further off in the corridors, but not only there. There was some in Hitler’s antechamber, at the top of the stairs leading to the exit.

The forensic examiner reread the records of the interrogations of those involved in removing Hitler’s inert body on 30 April 1945.

These witness statements agree with the traces taken in the bunker. The result of analyses would confirm that they were indeed traces of blood.

After the blood, the other fundamental index of the counter-inquiry: the two pieces of skull recovered outside the exit from Hitler’s bunker. They were in the same place where the two alleged bodies of Hitler and his wife had been discovered a year before. These new bones were hidden at a depth of sixty centimetres. Semenovsky analysed them and concluded that they were fragments of the same cranial arch. He assembled them to form no more than a piece. According to him, this bone belonged to an adult male. Obviously the hole that pierced the top did not escape his vigilance. He immediately imagined a bullet from a revolver. The exit angle of the bullet suggested to him that the shot had been fired from bottom to top, from right to left, towards the back. Very certainly in the mouth or under the chin. And not in the temple as Linge claimed. Had Hitler’s valet lied on that point? The Russian investigators expressed serious doubts concerning the reliability of his answers. They had already made him crack on his version of the Führer’s suicide, particularly about the shot fired by Hitler. That was during an interrogation on 28 February 1946:

In late February 1946, Linge was a wreck. He had lost about ten kilos, and his skin was eaten away by vermin. He had hardly slept for several weeks. That was exactly what the Soviet wanted. It was not without reason that the interrogation sessions were held at irregular intervals between 10:00 pm and 5:00 in the morning. Hitler’s proud valet had lost his arrogance. He smelt so bad that his own odour was unbearable to him. This special treatment was intended to make him crack. It worked. After more sleepless nights spent answering the questions of Russian officers and enduring their death threats, the former SS man requested some mercy. His eyes were the colour of a battlefield, his mouth twisted into an uncontrollable rictus. He wanted rid of his secret. That secret that weighed so heavily. The one that questioned the theory of Hitler’s double suicide: poison, then revolver. The investigators couldn’t get over it. Was this another trick on the part of this ill-omened Nazi? The questions came flying:

But on 30 April 1945, at about 4:00 pm, Linge also swore to the last occupants of the bunker that he had heard that famous shot. At least that was the version that Günsche gave to the Soviet investigators:

And yet Linge had lied to everyone. He had just admitted as much. It remained to be seen whether he had only lied about the shot… Was it really possible to smell the gunpowder from a firearm after only one shot, through doors designed to resist a chemical attack?

Linge’s interrogation continued:

The valet’s answers seemed to be becoming more and more confused. Their incoherence did not escape the investigators:

That essential lie was only discovered three months before the counter-inquiry in Berlin. Semenovsky, the forensics expert, took it into account in his report. And he had no hesitation in distancing himself from Linge’s version as regards the bullet to the temple. On the other hand, he did follow the former valet’s version concerning the fact that the individual on the sofa had received a shot to the head:

With this statement, Semenovsky could reduce to nothing the inquiry in June 1945 led by SMERSH. Except that there was no proof that the blood belonged to Hitler. The blood tests carried out on the trickles on the arm of the sofa would reveal that the blood was Group A. Like Hitler’s, according to the statements of his personal doctor, Dr. Morell. But also like millions of Germans. And given that he was unable to examine the corpse held by the Ministry of State Security, Semenovsky’s work remained incomplete. Mad with rage, the old criminologist went so far as to vent his fury at Viktor Abakumov in person. His report leaves no room for nuance:

The political system of the USSR was not used to seeing the flaws of its rulers being exposed to the light of day. The results of the Berlin mission risked being explosive. Particularly in late spring 1946. Moscow was undergoing a new series of purges. As always, Stalin acted on his own, and with brutality. He ruined some, promoted others, and fed grudges among his accomplices the better to control them. Heads rolled, even the biggest, particularly the biggest. Generals, but also eminent members of the intelligentsia. Among them was the very popular Marshal Zhukov. On 3 June 1946, the man who had won so many battles against the Nazis was stripped of his functions as commander in chief of the land army and deputy Defence Minister of the USSR. In particular, he was accused of “having lost all modesty and being carried away by personal ambition.” A perfect dialectic that could have applied to Stalin himself. Only one man emerged stronger from this wave of dismissals–Abakumov.

When he received the report from Dr. Semenovsky, Kruglov, the Minister of Internal Affairs, didn’t know what to do with it. Essentially, the conclusions hardly came as a surprise, and in a political system as unusual as the Soviet one, he considered it satisfactory. His ministry had worked hard to establish historical truth. But he also knew from experience that to attack one of Stalin’s protégés was to run the risk of disappearing for good. He didn’t want to end up like his colleague, the Minister of the Aeronautics Industry, Alexey Ivanovich Shakhurin, who was fired and then sentenced on 11 May 1946 to seven years in the gulag. His crime was to have disappointed Stalin in the quality of aeroplane manufacture for the air force.

After thinking long and hard, Kruglov opted for prudence. The old pathologist would have worked in vain. His work would be kept carefully at the bottom of a drawer, far from the eyes of the Soviet tyrant.

On 18 June the Nazi prisoners were sent back to the Soviet Union. Operation “Myth” came to an end. The mystery about Hitler’s death would remain unsolved for decades.

SUMMER 2017

It’s raining in Moscow. Late June. More than two months have passed since our disastrous stay in the Russian capital. Two months during which we tried to persuade Alexander Orlov, our contact at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the MID, to obtain authorisation for us to analyse Hitler’s teeth. But Alexander has vanished. We can’t get through to him, either by phone or mail. We are stuck. Is this how our investigation will end? A year and a half of persistence to reach this impasse? Many times, our contacts had given us commitments, made promises. “Yes, of course, we are in favour of these forensic studies. The skull? The teeth? You want them? Come on, we’re waiting for you!” The mysterious acronyms (GARF, MID, TsA FSB…), the administrative subtleties, the grim hierarchical decorum, we thought we had tamed them one after the other. We had endured internal quarrels and put up with inflated egos. Even the sudden disappearance of some of our contacts. Disappearances both literal and figurative, since one of our helpers at GARF died of a heart attack during winter 2017. Almost systematically, we quickly found that when one door opened another closed. But that didn’t matter because we had no choice. Hitler’s last human remains, or the remains alleged to be Hitler’s, are in Russia, and nowhere else. This indisputable premise grants enormous power to the Russian authorities. The power to decide who can examine them. Who and when.

A reality that has lasted since 5 May 1945, since the discovery in the garden of the Chancellery of the Third Reich of the alleged corpse of Hitler by the Red Army. We imagine that in just over seventy years we are not the first to have tried to persuade Moscow. Lana calls this seduction exercise the “belly dance.” As in the famous piece of oriental choreography, we have to keep on smiling in spite of the cavalier and disobliging attitudes of our contacts. Like the almost obligatory lack of respect at meetings, the authorisations cancelled at the last minute… Keeping calm and seducing them into letting us close to those pieces of historical evidence. The game is a biased one because we are the supplicants. Others have run the same gauntlets. People more illustrious than ourselves. Starting with the Allies in 1945.

At the time, the Anglo-American-French staffs tried to charm their Soviet “colleagues” to obtain information about Hitler. They generously offered confidential documents, in the hope of receiving something reciprocal:

The particularly friendly tone of this letter between the heads of secret services is very much at odds with the reality of the time. In Berlin, relations between the Allies and the Soviets had already deteriorated in early 1946. The Russians refused to share their data on the Hitler file and the definitive point of rupture was inexorably on the way. The American Colonel Koenig couldn’t ignore it. His letter looks like a last attempt at reconciliation, a friendly hand.

Reconciliation that the strict Alexey Sidnev spurned. The thirty-nine-year-old Russian general and representative of SMERSH in Berlin, and then of the NKVD, was already partly familiar with the documents sent by the Americans. Particularly Hitler’s testaments. The British had sent them to him the previous week. An initiative that the British had clearly taken without telling their American friends.

These “presents” from the Allies would soon stop. On 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill delivered a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in the presence of the American President Harry Truman. Churchill was no longer Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, since his defeat in the general election in July 1945, but he remained a political heavyweight at the international level. He was the first to be officially worried about the aggressive policies of the Soviet Union.

Stalin immediately seized the opportunity to confirm the rupture with the Western camp. In an interview granted to the Soviet daily newspaper Pravda on 14 March 1946, he demonstrated an unprecedented violence towards his former allies:

The Anglo-Americans compared to Hitler? Stalin had followed what we now call Godwin’s law with disconcerting swiftness, and established a point of no-return between the two camps. From then on, all contact between the Western and Soviet secret services was severed. The famous “Iron Curtain” also fell on the Hitler file. However, investigations into the circumstances of the Führer’s death continued. Each camp used the information in their possession to the greatest advantage. In this little game, the Soviets where a length ahead. In April–May 1945, they were the first to arrive in Berlin. They didn’t wait for the Anglo-Americans before laying their hands on thousands of documents and taking a large part of Hitler’s innermost circle prisoner. The Allies had also captured a number of witnesses in the western part of Germany, and discovered some highly valuable documents. Particularly Hitler’s doctors, his medical file, and even x-rays of his face. Information that is accessible today because it has been unclassified. An opportunity that we wouldn’t pass up. There is a sequence of five x-rays of Hitler’s face in the American archives. In these pictures dating from 1944, one can clearly make out the Führer’s jaws and teeth. Thanks to this historical source, we should be able to confirm the identification of the teeth that the FSB allowed us to observe in December 2016. But above all, we need to know where these x-rays come from and check that they are authentic.

Hugo Johannes Blaschke was Hitler’s personal dentist between 1934 and 20 April 1945. This Prussian was a man of great refinement, perfectly bilingual in English and German. And a convinced Nazi. A graduate of Philadelphia Dental School at the University of Pennsylvania, he returned to his country and served as a “field doctor” in the First World War. In 1931 he joined the NSDAP, and became a major in the SS in 1935. On Göring’s recommendation he became dentist to the Nazi elite. His patients included Himmler, Göring, Goebbels, Bormann, Speer, and above all Hitler and Eva Braun. As a reward for his good and loyal service he was awarded an honorary professorship and the rank of oberführer (brigadier general) of the Waffen-SS. He would be interrogated in November and December of the same year. The intention was to obtain as many details as possible about Hitler’s dentures, in order to be able to identify his corpse if the situation presented itself.

The dentist had no x-rays or access to his patient’s file, but his memory was perfect. He provided extremely important information for our investigation, particularly concerning the fact that Hitler suffered from severe dental problems. He had had extensive caries on many occasions. He was also subject to gingivitis and suffered from halitosis (bad breath). Many bridges had been designed to preserve his teeth. In spite of this treatment, his poor dental condition did not abate. “Towards the end of September 1944 I was called to the headquarters,” Blaschke relates. “Hitler complained about slight tenderness of the gingiva of the upper left jaw. He was bedridden. He was, as Professor Morell told me, suffering from an inflammation of the naso-pharyngial area.”[60] In January 1945 Hitler, who still complained about his teeth, asked his dentist to move to the Chancellery, near his bunker. The Führer consulted him only once, in February, for a superficial examination.

Faced with Soviet troops coming dangerously close to Berlin, Blaschke obtained permission to flee on the night of 19–20 April 1945. All of his medical files, including Hitler’s, would be lost with the aeroplane carrying them to Salzburg. The dentist, who was travelling on another flight, reached Bavaria safe and sound.

Luckily the Americans soon discovered other medical files on Hitler. Notable among these were x-rays of his face taken after the attempted assassination of Hitler on 20 July 1944. Three of these were taken on 19 September 1944 by Dr. Giesing at the military hospital in Rastenburg, in East Prussia. Erwan Giesing was Hitler’s personal ENT doctor. The x-rays show the frontal sinus (position nose-forehead), the sphenoidal sinus (position mouth-chin), and the maxillary, ethmoidal, and frontal sinuses (position chin-nose).

Two other x-rays dated 21 October 1944 were also found among the documents of Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Morell. He declared to the Americans that he could not remember under what circumstances they had been taken. These views show the maxillary, ethmoidal, and frontal sinuses (position chin-nose). To check that the two series of pictures showed the same person, the investigators compared the shape of the frontal sinuses. The examination was positive. Hitler’s sinuses were very large, and showed indications of frequent sinusitis.

For twenty-three years, this information served no purpose. The Soviets never allowed the Americans to approach the alleged bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun that they had in their possession. Besides, how could they have granted them this privilege, when officially they did not have the bodies? This version of events would be questioned by the publication of a sensational book in 1968. Lev Bezymenski, a former army translator and now a journalist, brought out a book in West Germany, entitled The Death of Adolf Hitler. For the first time since the fall of Berlin in May 1945, the secret of the bodies discovered by the Soviets was revealed with photographic evidence. This included photographs of the teeth attributed to Hitler: a maxillary bridge of nine teeth and a lower jaw of fifteen teeth. Thanks to this book, Blaschke’s testimony and the x-rays finally served a purpose.

In 1972, two Norwegian scientists, Reidar F. Sognnaes, Dean of Harvard School of Dental Medicine in Boston (United States), and Ferdinand Ström, pioneer of forensic odontology (the use of teeth to identify corpses), decided to carry out the first thorough examination of Hitler’s teeth.

An examination was performed under conditions that were less than optimal given that the two scientists had no physical access to the teeth, since these were still classified as military secrets in Moscow. The Norwegian dentists could work only from documents. On the one hand, they had the material from the American secret services: the records of interrogations of Hitler’s dentist and the five x-rays. On the other, they had the photographs published in the book by the former Red Army interpreter. At the time it was impossible to check Bezymenski’s reliability. In principle it remained questionable. But no matter. Sognnaes and Ström estimated that they had enough information to launch their investigation. They were sure that they could put an end to the most insane scenarios about the escape of Hitler and his survival of the fall of the Third Reich. Their work occurred in a special context. In fact, at the start of the 1970s, the Nazis were back in the news, thanks to the work of “SS hunters” like the Klarsfelds, but also the Israeli secret service, Mossad. The wider public thus became aware that former senior figures in the Hitler regime were living peacefully in the authoritarian republics of Latin America. Some would be arrested, like Eichmann and Barbie. Others, including Mengele, known as the “Angel of Death” for his sadistic medical experiments on prisoners, would escape judgement. If those men were able to flee Germany in 1945 and find refuge, why not the Führer? It was in this atmosphere of rumours and mystery that the dentists Sognnaes and Ström intervened.

For the first time since the end of the war, a non-Soviet scientific report lent credit to the theory of Hitler’s death. The story caused a storm at the time. But for want of direct access to the human remains, doubt persisted. Forty-five years after the work of Sognnaes and Ström, Philippe Charlier was able to provide an analysis of these teeth. Like the two Norwegian specialists, he hadn’t seen them. But he had at his disposal the photographs and videos that we had taken in December 2016. In this way he was able to compare them with the x-rays of Hitler’s face. The results were conclusive, morphological comparison of the dental prostheses left no doubt:

Dr. Charlier’s report confirms the conclusions of his illustrious predecessors. These are indeed Hitler’s teeth. Our inquiry could stop there. We could stop harassing Alexander Orlov, and give up all hope of returning to the FSB offices with Philippe Charlier so that he could examine the pieces of jaw hidden away so carefully since 1945. It would be so simple.

12 July 2017. Summer obstinately refused to come for the Muscovites. The sky merges with the grey of the pavements to form a horizon of impenetrable sadness. Pelting rain clears the streets of the few passers-by. We are with Philippe Charlier in Putin’s city. With a small suitcase. It contains a state-of-the-art binocular microscope. The Lubyanka, its heavy door, ID check, the suspicious expression on the guard’s face… We act out the same film as we did last December. Alevander Orlov likes springing surprises on us. Two weeks previously, he had told us the FSB’s reply. “You can come back. With Dr. Charlier. Your request has been confirmed. We should inform you that after you there will be no further examinations. We will refuse them.” Why this change of mind? We won’t ask that question. We don’t want to give them an excuse to change their minds again.

Inside the Lubyanka (FSB archives), in the security door, a youngish man with a light-coloured beard is waiting behind the military guard at reception. His name is Denis, and he is replacing Dmitri, the FSB officer who escorted us in December. Only first names, never surnames. Are those even their real first names? They both start with the same letter, a “d.” Probably a coincidence. Denis smiles complicitly at the guard, who checks our passports. We are in order. The same lift, the same floor. The third. The same little room, office 344, on the right of a windowless corridor. Nothing in the office has changed. Only the little Christmas tree has disappeared. Otherwise, there are still as many FSB officials keeping an eye on us. Including that tall blonde young woman who treated us with such suspicion. This time she is wearing a floral nylon dress short enough to reveal solid knees. Her taut face is at odds with the brightness of her outfit. Our smiles leave her cold. Did she have better things to do than waste her afternoon with some foreigners? Probably. Lana introduces Philippe Charlier to the five men and the young woman who will be standing next to us throughout the whole examination. They are intrigued by the small case. They want to check the forensic examiner’s equipment. The agreement made with Alexander stipulated that nothing was to be removed. The examination would be entirely visual. That requirement was mandatory. To respect the Russian imperatives, Philippe decided to bring a binocular microscope. The equipment does not damage the object under examination, and allows the user to study it by zooming up to thirty-five times. It can also take films and photographs with an integrated digital camera.

Lana lists the technical specifications of the microscope for her compatriots. Denis asks if there is a light on the machine. “A light? Yes a small one…” We don’t have time to finish the phrase before a flurry of “niets” echoes around the room. Everyone becomes agitated. They are worried by the light. “Niet laser, niet!” I hurry over to Lana and ask her to reassure them. It’s only a little built-in lamp, not a laser. Translate, quickly and clearly. Lana does so. The apparatus is on the table. It is turned on. The light is activated. Not a laser! It’s not a laser! We all insist. Denis leans over the machine before stepping back and confirming this to his colleagues. It’s fine! Philippe Charlier gives Lana and me a quizzical look. It’s 2:00 pm, and after an eighteen-month wait we have been given permission to study the remains attributed to Hitler.

In spite of the orders from FSB head office, the young woman in her summer dress can’t help balking at the idea of our being allowed to handle the teeth. She picks up the little cigarillo-box in which they are stored. She moves it away from Philippe. He intervenes gently and calmly. He asks Lana to translate. “Please tell her that I am only going to handle the teeth with sterile gloves. My gloves. Look, they’re new, I’ll put them on in front of you…” He picks up a medical plastic bag, tears it open and takes out the gloves. Very carefully, he puts them on, looking the young woman from the FSB in the eye. “Now I’m equipped, the best thing would be for her to arrange the pieces of jaw, one by one, on the sterile paper that I have arranged in front of me. That way nothing will be contaminated.” Philippe Charlier speaks slowly. His voice emanates a sense of professionalism that finally convinces the young woman. Against all expectation she complies.

The silence is total. The only sound is the rustle of the paper on which the first teeth have been laid out. The scientist handles them carefully, turning them around on their axis. First of all, the examination must allow him to check the authenticity of the teeth. Reassure himself that they aren’t fake. The FSB team are perfectly capable of making a copy on the basis of the x-rays and Hitler’s dental files. Lana and I share Philippe Charlier’s tendency to doubt everything. We are at the heart of one of the most powerful and controversial secret services on the planet. Manipulation is always possible. Not to admit that fact would be a professional shortcoming. So we need to check for traces of wear and patina, clues proving the age and authenticity of the teeth. “It’s really interesting,” Charlier says, zooming in. “Deposits of tartar are particularly visible on this prosthesis. I can see some organic remains, a bit of gum, perhaps some mucous membrane and partially carbonised soft tissue. The yellow metal of the prosthesis is marked with small stripes. That corresponds to the past presence of small crystals in foodstuffs. As far as I’m concerned there is no doubt, these dental prostheses are authentic. They have been worn long enough for tartar deposits to form. Their age seems compatible with the Second World War. I can state with confidence that they are not fake!”

The teeth have not been recreated by the KGB or its successor, the FSB. They are real, and the same ones as those seen in the x-rays of Hitler’s face. Their shape, the prostheses–there is no doubt about it. These are the teeth of the Nazi dictator. At last we’re making some progress. We can confirm that Hitler died in Berlin on 30 April 1945. Not in Brazil at the age of ninety-five, or in Japan, or in the Argentinean Andes. The proof is scientific, not ideological. Coldly scientific.

“His dental health was very poor,” Charlier observes. “This individual suffered from parodontopathy [a resorption of the mucous membrane to the level of the root of the teeth], resulting in tooth loss.” This coincides with the statements of his dentist, Dr. Blaschke. He told the Americans that Hitler had developed chronic gingivitis. There are multiple causes of this well-known illness,” Charlier goes on, “tobacco-smoking, poor nutrition, drug-taking, chronic infections of the mouth and vegetarianism.” Hitler didn’t smoke, he didn’t lack nutrition either in terms of quality or quantity, but he was a vegetarian. In those days decay caused by vegetarianism had not been identified, and a vegetarian diet was not backed up by nutritional supplements.

The pieces of the puzzle are coming together perfectly. But we need to go still further. Understand how he died.

“Don’t film me! No photographs!” The threatening tone is decidedly at odds with the floral pattern on her dress. The FSB official didn’t like me taking a photograph with her in my field of vision. Lara intervenes, as ever, to calm everyone down. Let’s not forget where we are. Or the fact that it could be stopped with a click of the fingers. Or a rustle of an acrylic dress. My deepest apologies seem to satisfy everyone present. The examination continues.

Looking for traces of acid or gunpowder from a firearm. According to the different versions, Hitler committed suicide with cyanide and/or a pistol shot to the head. If the gun was fired into the mouth, remains of gunpowder, antimony, lead and/or barium, to be precise, might still be present. The different fragments of jaw pass one by one before the Frenchman’s eagle eye. They all bear marks of carbonisation. “We may have information on exposure to fire,” Charlier explains. “The intense black traces at the level of bone and mucous membrane,” as well as the roots of the teeth, demonstrate a high degree of carbonisation. The fire must have been intense, since it managed to split part of the roots, exposing the dentine [also called the ivory of the tooth].” According to the statements of Linge and Günsche, Hitler was burnt using two hundred litres of petrol. The fire was intense, violent but relatively short. This scenario accords with Charlier’s observations. He establishes, for example, that traces of gum and muscle are perfectly apparent. This means that the body was not burnt completely. On 30 April 1945 the incessant Russian bombardment of the Reich Chancellery prevented the total cremation of Hitler. No one in the Führerbunker wanted to take the risk of staying in the gardens to keep alive the fire burning the corpses of the dictator and his wife.

“I think I’ve found something…” Philippe Charlier zooms in as far as possible on one of the dental prostheses. The image appears on the laptop computer connected to the binocular microscope. A vague mass slowly takes shape. “Look at this: the metal alloy of the prosthesis has undergone an astonishing alteration. One can distinguish the enamel of the tooth underneath it.” Sure enough, there is a hole in the gilded metal plaque and the white of the tooth can be seen underneath it. “We’re looking at the premolar,” he goes on. “What could have caused this?” Several hypotheses are possible. A manufacturing defect? A poor-quality prosthesis? Unlikely. Hitler was tended to by a famous dentist. He wouldn’t have risked giving him mediocre treatment. “So it might be due to acid, an oxidation of the metal.” Cyanide? On a premolar? Does that make sense? Hitler was said to have crushed his poison capsule with his back teeth, so his molars or premolars. Other teeth show the same traces of oxidation. In the course of the only autopsy performed on the alleged body of Hitler, the Soviets indicated that “fragments of glass and fine pieces of the ends of the medical ampoule were found in the mouth.” More than seventy years later, is it possible to find these fragments of glass?

The binocular microscope works miracles. It shows you things invisible to the naked eye. Philippe Charlier has never been so satisfied with his equipment. While he goes on inspecting the tartar deposits, he happens upon crystals that he immediately identifies. “They are grains of silica. They’re there, wedged between the dentine and the cement [the tissue that covers the dentine at the level of the root]. Was Hitler buried in sand?” Silica is a metalloid chemical element found in sand and cement, but also in the manufacture of laboratory glassware. It has the quality of being resistant to many acids including cyanide. But let’s come back to Dr. Charlier’s question. Was Hitler buried in a sandy area? It’s a hard one to answer. Not a priori. His body was found in the garden of the Chancellery. On the other hand, there could be traces of cement since the bunker was very close by and it had been damaged by the bombs. And most importantly, silica is a mineral present everywhere in earth. As to its use in laboratory glassware, its microscopic form is totally different from naturally occurring silica. The silica found on these teeth does not resemble the silica of laboratory glassware. For Philippe Charlier, that trail is closed. On the other hand, he is much less circumspect about blue traces. “On the surface of this tooth there is a surprising bluish deposit that I have difficulty explaining. Was there an interaction with an external element at the moment of death? Or at the moment of burial?” The blue is intense, almost a “Klein blue,” like a paint stain. The trace is small and could go unnoticed by the naked eye. The tooth in question is one of Hitler’s few remaining natural teeth. “You can see growth rings on it, the surface, the enamel, fibrous remains, dental tartar… There was an interaction between something and this tooth, but I don’t know with what. It is not dental tartar, I’m sure of that.” Charlier reflects. He has never seen this before. “There is no reason why cyanide would interact directly with enamel to create bluish coloration like this. Physically, chemically, there is no particular reason.” And yet this blue trace exists. “I will have to consult the forensic literature, particularly in the field of toxicology, because I’m at a loss.”

The French doctor now turns his attention to other tooth fragments. “Look! You can also see this blue in the crevices of the other teeth. It also appears on the surface of these prostheses.” More tiny deposits of the same appear. They are partially covered by deposits of sediment. At first Philippe Charlier thought they might be tartar. And that consequently these blue marks dated from several weeks or even months before Hitler’s death. The forensic pathologist quickly corrected his mistake. They are sediments, which could date from the burial of the bodies in the earth. Do these blue stains give us a clue to Hitler’s poisoning. At this stage, and since it is impossible to take even a tiny sample. Charlier is unable to reply.

The examination is coming to an end. All the teeth have been carefully analysed. For some minutes I have heard Lana talking to Denis in a low voice at the back of the room. I gesture to her to say that we’ve finished. Two hours was enough. The rest of the forensic study will now take place in Paris, with the examination of the images recorded by the binocular microscope. Lana isn’t listening to me. She’s very excited. “They’re going to show us Eva Braun’s teeth. This is a first!” A fragment of the teeth of the Führer’s wife! Philippe Charlier is still hunched over his machine. He asks simply: “Can I examine them too?” Lana has joined the group of FSB officials to thank them. So we’ve got Eva Braun’s teeth. Alleged teeth, to be precise. Because, unlike the situation with Hitler, we have no x-rays to confirm their identification. As a precaution, Philippe Charlier changes his sterile gloves and takes another sheet of paper, also sterile. Once he is ready he gestures to the young woman. She opens a box. It is much smaller than the one holding Hitler’s teeth, but just as “eccentric.” It looks like the box for a pair of earrings. Inside, resting on cotton wool, are three teeth, molars and a premolar, connected by a yellow metal prosthesis. “Spasiba” (Thank you) Charlier says, picking them up. He puts them delicately down in the middle of the microscope and adjusts the focus.

The first observation comes quickly: “We see the same bluish deposits on the surface of the teeth!” Cautiously, he adds: “On these teeth, which are presented to us as being those of Eva Braun.” Some clues corroborate the hypothesis that these remains have undergone the same post-mortem treatment as those of Hitler. Namely a cremation and a burial in a similar natural environment. “They have been carbonised in the same way. They are artificial teeth with a deposit of tartar on the prosthesis as well as grains of silica, exactly the same as on the previous teeth. We can clearly see the patina of wear on the metal of the prosthesis. I can confirm that these teeth have really been worn. And they cannot belong to the same individual as the one just now, because they are from an identical anatomic area.” So no trickery on the part of the Russians.

Eva Braun was thirty-three when she died. She had been the Führer’s official spouse for only a day. According to Soviet and Anglo-American investigations, she committed suicide by swallowing cyanide. “I’m going to have to analyse all this from scratch,” Philippe says, still zooming in on the little blue traces, “It’s really very strange…” He takes more photographs with the digital camera built into the binocular microscope. These photographs will allow him to re-examine the teeth in his Paris laboratory and perhaps close the file on Hitler’s death.

PARIS, SEPTEMBER 2017

They’re barely discernible to the naked eye. How many are there? Two, maybe three. Pieces–crumbs, rather–dark as dust. Philippe Charlier is holding up in front of his eyes a plastic phial sealed with a red cork. A label is attached to it, bearing the words “dental plaque A.H.” How did these fragments from Hitler’s teeth make their way to Paris? An accident, a concatenation of circumstances. After the test that he carried out at FSB headquarters in Moscow in July 2018, Dr. Charlier carefully put away the materials he had been working with. In this instance, two pairs of latex gloves and two sheets of paper on which the teeth had been arranged. Meticulous as ever, he didn’t mix them together: the paper and the gloves used for Hitler’s remains on one side, the ones for the teeth attributed to Eva Braun on the other. When he returned to Paris, before throwing everything away, he realised that some tiny pieces of tartar from Hitler’s teeth had come away during the examination. He automatically recovered them and stored them in a phial.

What was to be done? Alexander, our contact at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the officers of the FSB had always opposed any samples being taken from the teeth. We were familiar with that condition. And besides, how could we have escaped the close vigilance of the FSB officials during the microscope analysis? Inside the Lubyanka itself? Even Lana, always ready to attempt the impossible, wouldn’t have dreamed of it. Now we’re in Paris, far from Moscow. The Russian secret services can no longer intervene to prevent us from exploiting these fragments. Nonetheless, acting without their consent is out of the question. For two quite simple reasons: out of moral principle and out of professionalism. Two ideas on which Philippe Charlier is particularly keen. All the more so since, without the green light of the Russian authorities, it will be impossible to treat the analysis of these pieces of tartar in any official way. We would then find ourselves in the same situation as the American team from the History Channel that made the American documentary that was broadcast in 2009. Because they had no agreement with the Russian archives (GARF, in this instance), their revelations about the fragment of skull allegedly belonging to Hitler remain tainted with suspicion. In their case, several questions linger. How were those pieces of skull collected and by whom? The mystery surrounding the work of the American team means that their results cannot be exploited scientifically. Not without reason has Dr. Nick Bellantoni never published his work in a scientific journal, which means that it has never been validated. We aren’t going to make the same mistake.

Lana jumped with joy. “Some pieces came away? That’s incredible! What a stroke of luck…” Her enthusiasm barely surprises me any more, and neither does her boundless energy. As usual, obstacles seem to melt away as if by magic when she’s around. My fears and doubts become deluded neuroses. But I still take the time to set out my point of view: the potential wrath of our Russian contacts, their possible refusal, coercive reprisals (particularly for Lana who has the good fortune to have a Russian passport and to live mostly in Moscow). My imagination amuses her. She laughs at it. I can distinctly hear her doing so down the telephone. Is it an exaggeration to imagine that the FSB could, quite freely, harm in some way or another a Russian citizen who had put them in an awkward position?

“Don’t worry about me; quite the contrary, they will be delighted to learn that we have some pieces of the teeth.” Her logic makes me feel like a child learning a lesson.

“What was our agreement?”

“To make a purely visual examination.”

“Were we under constant surveillance during the analysis?”

“There were at least five of them watching us.”

So far, Lana is not mistaken. All we did was play the game by the rules they imposed.

“Is Philippe Charlier going to call into question the authenticity of the teeth?” Lana already knows the answer. She is practising a form of Socratic method on me. She is pulling me in the wake of her thought, and she insists that I reply. “No, he’s not going to claim that they aren’t Hitler’s teeth. On the contrary, he is categorical.”

So? I can hear the smile in Lana’s voice. “So, it’s all fine, Jean-Christophe. They will accept it. Trust me.”

The Laboratoire de Physique des Solides (Laboratory of Solid State Physics, LPS) of Paris-Sud University is under scaffolding. Some workmen are busy from dawn till dusk around the central building. They’re hammering, pounding, drilling. The quiet forest and the affluent detached houses of the little town of Orsay, south-west of Paris, barely pay the slightest attention to these regular disruptions. Philippe Charlier has come to terms with it as well. The essential thing is that he can carry out the analyses of the samples carefully stored in his little phial. In his forensic investigations, Charlier is able to rely on a cluster of experts. One of the very best is Raphaël Weil. This engineer at the LPS specialises in the scanning electron microscope. Equipment indispensable for the analysis of the morphology and chemical composition of samples, without damaging them. Thanks to this machine and to Raphaël Weil’s gifts, the “crumbs” of dental tartar from the teeth stored at the TsA FSB will yield up all their secrets. It’s a huge project: a search for vegetable and meat fibres (since the Führer had been a vegetarian for years, the slightest fibre of meat would destroy our hypotheses), and traces of the components of gunpowder (from firearm ammunition). The chief goal is to know whether Hitler really fired a bullet into his mouth. Not forgetting, of course, the bluish traces found on the surface of the prostheses. “You can no longer do without the scanning microscope when performing a historical anthropological study,” Charlier insists. “I hope that the chemical analysis will allow us to discover the elements that go to make up the prosthesis,” he adds. “And thus understand what could have caused that blue deposit. Is it an interaction with the cyanide…?”

For once, the FSB has reacted promptly. It’s Dmitri, the first one who replied to Lana. Dmitri, the agent of the Russian secret service who escorted us on our first visit to the Lubyanka. “Of course. No problem. Niet problème!” Lana was right. As she had imagined, a simple letter from Philippe Charlier should be enough to reassure the Russian authorities. Concise, clear, and precise, the report from the French forensic pathologist was swiftly dispatched. He repeated that he had no doubt about the identity of the teeth. They were Hitler’s. Normally, within a day or two we would receive the official letter from the FSB or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the agreement, the green light, a positive sign, however vague, however brief.

Nothing. Two weeks.

Then a month.

Then almost two months.

Nothing!

The same absurd and Kafkaesque routine. Lana told me over and over that her contacts had confirmed once again on the phone that we could carry out analyses. I insisted on having a written record. “Ah, a written record…?” Lana said with surprise, having suddenly fallen victim to amnesia. “I get it, I’ll send them a reminder.” And again we wait. For days.

Then, when all seemed lost, the answer came. My email. It was Alexander Orlov, our dear Alexander from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mother Russia, sending me an email in French. Here, in English translation, is an extract: “It seems to me that if you analyse the particles from Hitler’s jaw that adhered to your gloves and your conclusions are not in conflict with the official position of the Russian side, we will have no right to.”

It is 7 November 2017, the leaves are turning yellow on the trees, the silent birds are saving their strength for bracing temperatures to come. I catch myself smiling. Is it exhaustion, nerves, or a lack of lucidity?

Alexander’s email appears in front of me. And I smile at it. Everything’s there. Or almost everything. “We will have no right to.” A word is missing and everything collapses. Over two months waiting for this message. Dozens of calls to Russia, reminder letters, supplications… And for what? To receive an incomplete and unusable phrase. Is it out of malice? A perverse desire to play with our resilience? Or simply a highly developed form of Muscovite administrative procrastination?

Clearly Philippe Charlier isn’t satisfied with Alexander’s message. “We will have no right to.” No right to WHAT?!!!

Late afternoon: 7 November 2017. I decide to send a reminder to Alexander.

Not to annoy him. Not to vex him. Choosing my words tactfully.

“I notice the care that you have taken to reply to me in French. Nonetheless…”

Think.

“Nonetheless, a word is missing from your reply. You say: ‘We will not have the right to…’ I imagine you mean ‘the right to prevent you’ or ‘to forbid you’. Could you please just confirm?”

Lana? Nothing”! Lana is no longer in contact with the FSB, or with Alexander. The situation in Russia is becoming increasingly tense. Accusations are being made about Russian interference in the last presidential elections. No end is in sight for Syria and its military-humanitarian-religious nightmare either. The Putin regime is increasingly adopting a hard line of aggressive isolationism. Everything that comes out of the Kremlin smells of sulphur, as it did in the good old days at the height of Stalinism. And here we are benefiting from the goodwill of the Russian power that frightens so many people.

Seven days. It took Alexander seven days to pick out the right word, the most correct one, the one closest to his thoughts and send it to me. He even found several. He writes them in capital letters as if screaming them in my face: “WE WILL NOT ACCUSE (INCRIMINATE, INCULPATE) YOU.”

Now we can carry out the analyses. As far as we know, these are the first ever performed with a scanning electron microscope.

A world first.

And the hope of resolving the mystery of Hitler’s death.

“With current scientific techniques, we have the means to go much further than we could in 1945 or 1970,” Dr. Charlier says enthusiastically. “We have the means to acquire a toxicological, chemical vision of this tartar. All kinds of advantages encouraging the revelation of the truth.”

“You’ve done them all. St Louis, Richard the Lionheart, Charlemagne, Mary Magdalene… So who’s this one?”

Raphaël Weil knows Philippe Charlier very well. He’s been working with him for about ten years. He suspects that this time, yet again, the object of study for the day is a leading historical figure.

“So, which era?”

“World War Two,” the pathologist replies evasively. “The subject is a German,” he goes on. “An important historical figure, very important, even.”

Raphaël Weil looks down at the phial and sees the label with the initials “A.H.” He asks no further questions. “I’ve only got the morning,” is all he says, in a serious voice. “So let’s get going.” Of the three pieces collected, only two will be examined. The two larger ones. The less small, to be precise. The first is, at the most, 2.5 mm long by 1.3 mm thick. The second one is even thinner. But size doesn’t matter. The microscope is so powerful that it can see things on the scale of a micron. Most importantly, it will tell us the chemical composition of these tiny samples. “The idea is to have confirmation of the composition of this tartar, what was the individual’s diet, do we find only vegetable fibres, or also meat fibres? And then, last of all, I would like you to look for traces of poison.”

Not having been able to take a sample of the blue traces, Philippe Charlier hopes to collect convincing information from the tartar. Not least concerning the nature of the prostheses. “I wasn’t able to examine those prostheses at an elemental level,” he explains to Raphaël Weil. As in detective novels, the slightest detail can turn out to be the determining factor that resolves an investigation. Charlier is all too aware of this. That’s why he warns his partner: “Those prostheses were quite badly damaged, and they didn’t seem to me to be of very good quality. What I’d like you to do is to find their elemental signature. That’s essential for an understanding of a possible interaction between them and the cyanide.” In plain words, could the blue traces have been caused by a reaction between the cyanide and the metal of the prostheses? Did Hitler commit suicide by poisoning, as the Soviet investigators claimed in May 1945?

Is cyanide an effective poison? Is it painful? Hitler must have asked those questions to the doctors surrounding him in his bunker. We know that he checked its deadly effects on his dog Blondi, the Alsatian dog that he loved so much. As described earlier, he forced it to swallow a capsule. Many witnesses have described the scene. It was on 29 April 1945, in the middle of the night. Hitler no longer had any illusions about the outcome of the battle of Berlin. The Red Army was only a few streets away from his lair. In his eyes suicide was becoming the only imaginable end. But Himmler had just betrayed him by trying to negotiate directly with the Anglo-Americans; the same man who had supplied the cyanide capsules. And what if that “traitor to the Reich” had altered its composition? In a new fit of paranoia, Hitler decided to test the poison on his dog. Professor Haase, who was in charge of the hospital in the bunker, performed the macabre task with the help of the bunker’s dog handler. The animal died. The versions of this episode vary according to the witnesses. Rattenhuber, the head of the Führer’s personal guard, would later tell the Russians who took him prisoner that the dog suffered, cried out in agony and finally died after long convulsions. Hitler was profoundly shocked by the effects of the poison. Linge, Günsche, and Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s private secretaries, agreed on a different version: after Blondi’s death, which he did not in fact witness, the Führer just acknowledged the effectiveness of the poison, showing no emotion. What is certain, on the other hand, is that the capsule worked perfectly. Was Hitler reassured? Yes, if we are to believe his entourage. He boasted of the merits of the poison to those around him. Traudl Junge reveals: “Hitler told us that death by poison was completely painless. Your nervous and respiratory systems were paralysed, and you died in a few seconds.”[62] Was he lying to his devoted followers, or did he really not know the secondary effects of cyanide? All his life Hitler was suspicious about doctors and any treatment they prescribed. He must have known the terrible truth: poisoning of that kind is fatal, but absolutely not painless.

Depending on the dose of cyanide and the weight of the individual, their age, their state of health, and whether they have just eaten or not (it has been proven that cyanide acts more quickly on an empty stomach), death is more or less swift. But it always follows intense suffering. The first pains are manifested at the neurological and cardiovascular levels. Severe migraines appear very quickly. Then dizziness, confusion, a sense of inebriation… After that comes the sense of being unable to breathe. Like a prolonged fit of apnoea. Anxiety is added to pain. The individual is seized by general convulsions and then loses consciousness. A few minutes later death comes by cardiac arrest. How long does it take to lose consciousness? It is all a matter of dosage, the type of cyanide, and the mode of its administration. Himmler would have taken fifteen minutes to die after taking his cyanide capsule. That detail was reported by British soldiers who had just arrested him by the Danish border and impotently witnessed his suicide on 23 May 1945. However, the death of the head of the SS also remains surrounded by shadowy areas. Himmler’s autopsy, like the official report of his death, is not declassified even today. Both remain classified as “military secrets” in the British archives. They should not be accessible until 2045, or a hundred years after his death.

It is often noticed that a strong smell of bitter almonds is given off after the use of cyanide. In the episode with the dog Blondi, the witnesses are united in remembering this typical odour hanging in the air. That tenacious smell can linger for a long time. In the case of Hitler and Eva Braun, the Soviet forensic team noticed it during the autopsy. But the bodies had been carbonised and buried for several days: “[…] upon opening of the corpse a marked bitter almond smell was perceived. The conclusion reached is therefore that the death […] was cause by poisoning with a cyanide compound.”[63] Is it possible that the smell could have persisted for such a long time after the suicide? And particularly that it could have resisted intense carbonisation? Did the Soviet forensic team not exaggerate this theory of bitter almonds in order to confirm the cyanide theory? A theory, as we were able to establish in the Russian Archives, which Stalin preferred because, in his eyes, suicide by poison was a contemptible act for a warlord.

Some eyewitnesses to Hitler’s death mention that famous smell of almonds. Others do not. That incoherence is easily explained. Today we know that the smell is not perceptible to everyone. It is accepted that between 20 and 40 per cent of people are insensitive to the smell. So should we still accept the hypothesis of cyanide in Hitler’s suicide? Might the smell of bitter almonds reported by the witnesses to the suicide not have been caused solely by the death of Eva Braun? In her case, the use of cyanide has never been called into question. Linge remembers seeing traces of pain characteristic of this kind of poisoning on the young woman’s face. In his memoirs, Hitler’s valet adds that he found a small box on the table by the sofa where the two corpses were lying. It was in that box, according to him, that the Führer’s wife’s capsule had been stored. But it is important to note that this box “no longer exists” in the reports on the Soviet interrogations of Linge.

The night of 26–7 February 1946:

More contradictions, more doubts. Was Linge lying when he gave his answers to the officers of the Soviet secret services? Or when he wrote his memoirs? These changes to his story, the constant alteration of details, encouraged conspiracy theories, according to which Hitler might not have died in his bunker and might have been able to escape.

The Soviet investigators also had their doubts. They very quickly identified a flaw in Linge’s scenario. That of establishing the deaths of Hitler and his wife:

Joël Poupon is very familiar with the effects of cyanide. Unlike Linge, he has no shortage of degrees. He is a specialist in mineral analysis in the laboratory of biological toxicology at the Saint-Louis-Lariboisière Hospital in Paris. Philippe Charlier immediately thought of him as the one to help him resolve the mystery of the blue stains found on Hitler and Eva Braun’s teeth. Dr. Poupon’s first reaction to the pictures of those stains was to say “that’s incredible!” in an open manner quite unfamiliar in this rather reserved scientist. Perhaps it was the clarity and depth of that blue that left him anything but indifferent. A thick, almost sombre blue like… Prussian blue. That is the name of this singular colour. A colour created chemically by mixing iron sulphate and potassium ferrocyanide. The blue owes its name to the fact that it was discovered by a German chemist in Berlin in the early eighteenth century. Its shade corresponds to many of the traces left on the teeth stored in the FSB archives. Dark blue–kuanos in ancient Greek–which gave us the word “cyanide.”

As the quotation attributed to the Swiss doctor and philosopher Paracelsus has it, “Everything is a poison and nothing exists without toxicity; it is only the dose that makes a thing not a poison.” For cyanide this is very much the case. If, in everyday language, cyanide is widely associated with a poison that causes sudden death, often used in the shady worlds connected with espionage, in reality this chemical compound is part of our everyday life. Without necessarily putting us in danger. Thus we find cyanide, hydrogen cyanide (HCN), in cherry and apricot stones, and indeed in apple pips. If it is quite rare to eat those stones, we do eat bitter almonds. And they contain a fair amount of cyanide. Luckily, unless we eat them in enormous quantities, our body has no difficulty resisting this natural cyanide.

This compound can also be extracted by chemical methods and produced in different forms: gaseous (used by the Nazis in the gas chambers), liquid, but also in soluble salts. In this last case we talk about potassium cyanide, ammonia cyanide, or calcium cyanide. Was this the case with these teeth? To check, you need only to lay hands on one of these capsules. Not just any capsule: one of those dedicated to senior Nazi dignitaries, the ones that were distributed in the Führerbunker. After a great deal of research in all the museums and archives of Europe, we learned that one of those capsules was kept in the pharmaceutical museum in Heidelberg, Germany. Sadly that information was correct but out of date. When we contacted them, the museum told us that they hadn’t kept the capsule! A photograph, just a photograph, would have allowed us to check whether the cyanide was in liquid or salt form. No photograph! The staff of the museum hadn’t kept anything. No photograph, even in black and white, even blurry. Nothing.

And a report? Some data, an analysis, anything…? “Nein!” A “nein” not much different from the “niets” that we received so often in Moscow.

No capsules in Germany, nothing in Russia and nothing in France. Which left the British and the Americans.

A video dated 4 June 1945 gave us hope. This was a British news story soberly titled “The Last of Europe’s Butchers.” The “butcher” in question was none other than Himmler. In these pictures, you can see the house where he is supposed to have committed suicide, as well as his corpse. But most importantly it shows a cyanide capsule. The quivering, nasal voice of the journalist of the time explains that this is a capsule identical to the one used by Himmler. By freezing the image we can tell without risk of error that the cyanide is in the form of a colourless liquid, not powder. Only one of the ends of the capsule, thinner than the other, presents an opaque and coloured appearance.

In all likelihood, the cyanide used by Himmler must have been hydrogen cyanide, better known as Prussic acid. Prussic, because it was discovered in the late eighteenth century by a Swedish chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, on the basis of Prussian blue. Furthermore, in German, Prussic acid is called Blausäure, or “blue acid.” This form of cyanide is probably the most dangerous of the lot. Fatal from a dose of 50 milligrams. Hitler and his wife very probably received the same type of cyanide.

It remains to be seen if the dictator used this poison to kill himself.

Günsche didn’t think so!

He swore as much in a court in his country, in Germany. That was in 1945. The former SS man had just been freed from the Soviet camps after ten years of detention. He came back on 28 April 1956. He then discovered that Germany had been divided into two states in 1949. In the west, the three occupied zones under American, British, and French control formed the BRD (the Federal Republic of Germany). He learned, most importantly, that after being sentenced (in 1950) and condemned to twenty-five years in prison by a Soviet court (he would be freed six years later after an intervention by Konrad Adenauer, the Chancellor of the BRD), he also had some questions to answer in a German court. Not on his own behalf, but to bring a legal end to Hitler’s fate. Ten years after the fall of the Nazi regime, it was time to rule once and for all on the death of the dictator. Günsche was not the only person close to Hitler to return to German soil. In 1944, Adenauer negotiated with the Soviets for the repatriation of the last German prisoners, those convicted of war crimes. Among them we find the three major witnesses of the last hours of Hitler, Günsche as well as Linge and Baur. Günsche and Linge’s statements were recorded by the court in Berchtesgaden. They were made separately and over several days between 10 February and 19 June 1956.

Until 2010, these audio tapes slumbered on shelves in the State Archives in Munich. For technical reasons it was impossible to play them. Carefully restored, they are now accessible once again. In the recordings, the two men testify before a judge and representatives of the Bavarian police, including the head of the criminology service and an expert doctor. Once again, Linge and Günsche were interrogated about the last moments of Hitler in his bunker on 30 April 1945. The two men were exhausted by years of detention in Soviet jails, and particularly by the unstinting interrogation sessions conducted by the Russian secret services. For ten long years they were asked to repeat the same facts over and over again. Could they even remember with any precision what really happened on 30 April 1945? Had their memories not been erased by being repeatedly summoned and called into question?

Before judges in their country, the two men replied again, almost mechanically. Günsche declared: “As I have already said, I carried the body of Eva Braun–which was not covered–in my arms, and I noticed an extraordinarily strong smell of almonds. I did not notice that smell on Hitler. Particularly when his corpse was set down on the ground in the garden. When Bormann pulled away the blanket [covering Hitler], I brought myself quite close to it, and noticed nothing of the sort.”[64]

Was the Führer’s former aide-de-camp telling the truth? Unlike the Soviets, who stressed the theory of suicide by poisoning, an act which they thought was tainted with cowardice, did Günsche not want to present his boss as a man capable of killing himself with a bullet to the head? With all the warlike symbolism attached to the gesture in his eyes? The witness statement that Günsche gave to the German court, while rich in details, partially contradicts the one given by Linge. And it does so on certain important points. This is what Günsche has to say about discovering the corpse of Hitler and his wife in their antechamber:

The German investigators took note, but were surprised. They wanted details. Günsche obliged:

So Hitler had killed himself in an armchair and not on a sofa with Eva Braun. The aide-de-camp’s version contradicted the one that Linge gave the German investigators:

Who is telling the truth? Is it possible to make a mistake like that? If we keep to the arrangement of the furniture in the room where the two suicides took place, the answer is no! The German investigators returned repeatedly to the arrangement of the room. And they asked Linge to confirm it.

It’s hard to be more precise.

Unlike the written reports of the Soviets, for the first time Linge’s and Günsche’s statements are given here in oral form. The intonations of their voices, the tone and the phrasing, are additional information that helps us spot flaws in their answers.

Linge and Günsche seem very sure of their memories in these recordings. Neither of them has to search for words, neither is hesitant. And yet, for Linge, Hitler was facing the entrance on a sofa, beside Eva Braun. For Günsche, he was in front of the sofa, in an armchair.

This was a serious dilemma. Who were they to believe? Which version would they accept? Who was lying? Or who was mistaken?

Was Günsche telling the truth when he stated that Hitler hadn’t taken poison?

This episode is a perfect illustration of the near impossibility of trusting statements by witnesses to Hitler’s last moments. To get round this factual lacuna, there is, however, a solution: science.

Hence the presence of Philippe Charlier in the Laboratory of Solid State Physics in the Paris suburbs.

They have already spent over two hours going over the two fragments of tartar, micron by micron. Raphaël Weil works patiently and methodically. Nothing must escape him. In a few moments he will know everything about the chemical composition of these two pieces of evidence from the FSB archives. And perhaps he will find information about the composition of the prostheses. He is looking in particular for mercury, lead, arsenic, copper and, of course, iron. Because cyanide is impossible to reveal. Its traces disappear within twenty-four hours after its ingestion. And even faster if the corpse is burnt or kept at temperatures higher than 20º C. The clock shows 12:30pm. Raphaël Weil has gone on working for longer than planned. He has forgotten to be hungry. His concentration is at its peak, errors of interpretation are out of the question. Philippe Charlier is getting impatient. He awkwardly apologises to his fellow investigator. “Take your time,” he repeats to conceal his excitement, before asking again: “So… Is there any?” Calmly, after each calculation by the machine, the technician lists the chemical elements that have been revealed: calcium, potassium, phosphorus… but no iron, or so little that it is impossible to determine whether it comes from the fragments or the “chamber” of the microscope in which the pieces of tartar were arranged. Philippe Charlier will find out no more than that. His disappointment is total.

In fact it isn’t. Or not entirely.

Raphaël Weil turns towards the forensic scientist. Admittedly there is no information about the prostheses, but he has something better. He has absolute scientific proof of the authenticity of the tartar.

On the screen of the scanning electron microscope, a black-and-white image appears. It is blurred. It looks like a NASA command post from the time of the moon landings. Pebbly ground like that of a meteorite appears very gradually. The top of the screen comes into focus at last. “We’re getting there, you have to be patient,” Raphaël Weil says, without looking at me. Small bubbles form and fill the whole screen. Philippe Charlier recognises them immediately. “We have a classic view of dental tartar with these round shapes, like globules. This testifies to the phenomenon of calcification of dental plaque into dental tartar.” The engineer confirms: “All these globules are really the signature of the tartar.”

But the analysis doesn’t stop there. Very quickly, a vegetable fibre appears. Then another one. On the other hand, no meaty fibre is revealed. A simple piece of meat of even a micron would have been enough to call into question the attribution of these teeth to Hitler. At the moment of his suicide, the dictator had been a vegetarian for several years. The pathologist is reassured by the absence of any elements of meat.

Can he go even further with these two fragments of tartar? Can he tell if the Führer fired a bullet into his mouth? Antimony, atomic number 51, barium, atomic number 56, lead, atomic number 82. That is what Raphaël Weil is looking for. After quickly checking the periodic table, the engineer precisely calibrates his electronic microscope. Philippe Charlier has chosen to concentrate on those three minerals with a very precise goal in mind. If a gun was fired into Hitler’s mouth, traces of those three chemical elements would inevitably be found in his dental tartar.

The theory of Hitler’s suicide by firearm in the mouth was first presented by the British in November 1945.

Not even the best investigator would dare to inquire into the death of an individual without having access to the body, and without the opportunity to question eyewitnesses. But that was the situation of the Allied forces when they learned of Hitler’s suicide, in early May 1945. As we have already described the Anglo-American staffs could not agree on confirming the Soviet version. The one which claims that the Führer had very probably escaped. Then they tried the impossible. To bring together the greatest possible number of witness statements with their few Nazi prisoners who had been in the Führerbunker. The British delivered their report to the occupying forces in Germany (the Americans, the Russians, and the French) on 1 November 1945. With pragmatism and realism, the report begins with a confession in the form of resignation: “The only conclusive evidence that Hitler is dead would be in the discovery, and certain identification, of the body. In the absence of this evidence, the only positive evidence consists in the circumstantial accounts of certain witnesses who were either familiar with his intentions or eye-witnesses of his fate.” The British inquiry relied on a man who was close to Hitler. His name was Erich Kempka. He was thirty-five years old, and the dictator’s personal chauffeur. But he had only found out about the Führer’s death through Otto Günsche, Hitler’s aide-de-camp. Kempka gives an account of that scene with Günsche in his memoirs, published in 1951: “It was a dreadful shock. ‘How could that happen, Otto? I was speaking to him only yesterday! He was healthy and calm!’ Günsche was still so overcome that he could not speak. He merely raised his right arm, imitated holding a pistol grip with his fist and pointed to his mouth.”[68] Kempka presented this episode in the same way to British investigators in 1945. It was partly because of Kempka that the inquiry report by the British on 1 November 1945 states in black and white:

Did the author of this report, the English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, suspect that the Soviets hadn’t told the whole truth about Hitler’s death? During the official presentation of his inquiry to the officers of the occupying forces in Germany, Trevor-Roper attentively observed the attitude of the Russian representatives. A Red Army general was invited to react to the work of the British. Would the officer with the red star finally reveal something? Trevor-Roper would never forget his reply: “When invited to comment, [he] replied laconically and in a toneless voice: ‘Very interesting.’”[69]

More than seventy years after this episode, we may be about to find out if Trevor-Roper was right. And if Kempka wasn’t lying. Had Hitler fired a bullet into his mouth?

“Antimony?” Charlier asks.

“No,” Raphaël Weil replies.

“Lead?”

Raphaël says: “No, and no barium.”

This exchange of short phrases goes on for many minutes. Until the result of the last analysis.

“And?”

Charlier turns towards me. He had almost forgotten that I was there. My question surprises me. His “nothing” sounds like everything.

“Nothing!”

On the other hand, he is able to announce with certainty the end of the Hitler mystery.

Winter is about to fall like a languorous veil over Paris. Nearly two years of investigation are coming to an end.

Lana has stayed in Moscow. She is waiting.

I go to the Paris suburbs. Towards the west, just past Versailles, to Philippe Charlier’s medical anthropology and forensic laboratory at the university of Versailles-Saint-Quentin.

A grimacing face and bulging eyes that leave no doubt about his mood; the welcome is far from warm. All around us, other equally malevolent expressions, some of them sticking out their tongues as if summoning us to a sacrificial rite.

“So, this one comes from Oceania. The other one is from West Africa…” Philippe Charlier no longer knows where to put his masks and other totemic figures. His office looks more like the store-room of an imaginary museum of primitive art than the office of a forensic research scientist. Is it to help us remember that he is also an anthropologist?

A certain tension fills the office. Is it the doctor’s white coat or the worrying assemblage of indigenous tutelary figures around us? Unless it’s simply the exhaustion of those months of battles over a historical and political inquiry.

Philippe Charlier is sitting down, using the serious voice of those who are aware of the importance of the moment.

He begins: “Quite often the death of a historical figure is surrounded by mystery: people always imagine that the person isn’t dead, that they have escaped. People don’t like a classic death; it’s too simple, too ordinary. Forensic work seeks to separate the true from the false, and supply definitive conclusions in line with scientific developments. I apply the same seriousness and the same objectivity to a case pleaded in a courtroom and an archaeological case.”

A giant portrait of Henry IV rests on the floor, against the wall. It is a reconstruction made in 3D by Philippe Charlier’s team. The old French king seems to be listening impatiently.

“And?” I ask, just to bring his circumlocutions to an end. “The human remains stored in Moscow: are they Hitler’s or not?”

Not a sound. Then: “The skull, I don’t know.”

The visual examination carried out by Philippe Charlier, limited by the uncooperative attitude of the GARF teams, did not allow him to reach a conclusion: it was impossible to determine the age of that fragment of skull. Contrary to the declarations of Nicholas Bellantoni, the retired American archaeologist at the University of Connecticut, the extent of the sutures is not an indication of whether that piece of skull belonged to a young person. Philippe Charlier is categorical. The x-rays of Hitler’s face made in the autumn of 1944 allowed him to contest the analysis of his American colleague. “In those x-rays, you can see the sutures at the top of Hitler’s skull,” he explains. “These sutures are quite wide apart. That is the proof that you can’t claim that because sutures are open they belong to a young individual. It’s an argument that doesn’t hold water.” As you may remember, Nick Bellantoni explained in 2009 that: “The bone seemed to be very thin,” the American archaeologist says. “Male bone tends to be more robust, and the sutures where the skull plates come together seem to correspond to someone under forty.”[70]

Philippe Charlier insists: “The skull belongs to an adult. Full stop. On the other hand. I do know about the teeth. They’re Hitler’s!”

I go on: “Are you a hundred per cent certain?”

“In forensic science, we don’t like to give figures for our results, but we are certain that this isn’t a historical forgery. And we are certain that there is an anatomical match between the x-rays, the descriptions of the autopsies, the accounts of the witnesses, mainly those who made and manufactured those dental prostheses, and the reality that we have held in our hands. All of these analyses taken together confirm to us that the remains examined are those of Adolf Hitler, who died in Berlin in 1945. And all of this destroys the theories of his possible survival.”

And the bullet in the mouth? And the cyanide?

Did the bits of dental tartar allow him to answer those two questions? Was the British theory in 1945 about Hitler’s death erroneous? Was Trevor-Roper mistaken?”

“The chemical analysis of the surface of dental tartar has enabled us to look for traces of metals that are found when a shot has been fired into the mouth. Normally there are combustion gases, gunpowder, incandescence deposited in the oral cavity, the tongue, the mucous membrane… and therefore in the tartar. But we have found nothing.”

So Hitler didn’t fire a bullet into his mouth!

Kempka lied when he said that Günsche, the aide-de-camp, had mimed the gesture of a pistol being fired into his mouth. Even Günsche stated in 1956, when questioned by the German court, that Kempka had made everything up. Here is his deposition:

We had to wait for over half a century to prove Günsche right, and confirm that Hitler did not shoot himself in the mouth. And right beyond any possible doubt. Science triumphs over all the witness statements taken together, over emotion, over attempts at manipulation. And it confirms the version repeated several times by the man who first discovered the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun: Heinz Linge, the dictator’s loyal valet. During the interrogations carried out by the Soviets, in the interviews given to the newspapers, to the radio stations and television channels, in his memoirs published after his death in 1980, it’s always the same scenario: “When I came in, on my left, I saw Hitler. He was in the right-hand corner of the sofa… Hitler’s head was tilted slightly forward. On his right temple there was a hole the size of a ten-cent coin.”[72]

And the cyanide?

And the blue traces on the teeth?

Philippe Charlier has to admit his helplessness. Those blue traces are surprising, startling, and most importantly, disconcerting.

But the scientist can’t go any further without taking a sample of the teeth kept in Moscow. Alexander Orlov claims it’s impossible. For his part, Dmitri confirmed to Lana that she had to move on to something else.

Switch to a new inquiry.

“They told me that no analysis will be carried out.” Lana herself told me that we could hope for nothing else for now. “They just wanted proof that the teeth belonged to Hitler. Now that it’s done they’re closing everything up again.”

But what if we had concluded that they weren’t his?

My question, rhetorical though it was, made Lana freeze: “That would have been a big problem for Russia.”