For 79 years, the details surrounding Adolf Hitler’s death have been the subject of intense speculation.
Did he kill himself in a bunker of the Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945, by shooting himself in the head, as is widely believed? Or did he follow Eva Braun, whom he had married the day before, by also taking a cyanide capsule? Were their bodies doused with gasoline, burned and buried, as eyewitnesses claimed? Or did he survive and flee abroad, as Soviet investigators suggested?
While Éric Laurier, head of forensic medicine at Valenciennes Hospital in northern France, is hardly the first author to explore these questions, some of his findings are certainly among the strangest.
Not least among the dizzying array of anomalies and curiosities in the investigation conducted by Soviet forensic experts, which Laurier analyzes in his new book Le Cadavre d’Hitler, is the revelation that one of the thirteen bodies found in the bunker were discovered, was ruled out as Hitler’s body. because of a sock.
The Soviets concluded that since the sock was damned and the Nazi dictator would never wear such a shoddy garment, the body could not be Hitler’s.
“The failure to properly examine a corpse based on a small piece of clothing shows the imaginative approach of the Red Army in selecting the bodies for examination,” Laurier said. told the Times.
It is just one example, Laurier argues, of the extent to which Soviet research was influenced by political considerations in a climate in which scientific facts became subordinate to Stalinist propaganda.
By claiming that the Führer might have escaped to Spain or Argentina, Stalin diverted the world’s gaze from a messy and contradictory account of Hitler’s final days and instead cast doubt on the claims of Britain and other countries that he had died in Berlin.
Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun, whom he finally married after fourteen years in his bunker under Berlin – the day before they both died
The last moments of Hitler and Braun, here dining together, have long been the subject of intense speculation among researchers and scholars.
Hitler, right, is seen talking to his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels during a dinner in the Führerbunker
Such obfuscation lived on long after Stalin’s death in 1953, Laurier believes, with a 1968 Soviet autopsy report claiming Hitler died of cyanide poisoning, shaped by a desire to portray his downfall as a cowardly affair.
It is striking in this context that Hitler had his dog Blondi poisoned the day before his own death to test the effectiveness of the cyanide capsules that the SS had made available to him. By claiming that the dictator used cyanide, the Soviets suggested that Hitler had died a dog’s death.
“The remains of those who died in the bunker were numbered 1 through 13 and those of Hitler and Eva Braun were numbered 12 and 13,” said Laurier, whose title translates as Hitler’s Corpse.
“The Soviets put forward the hypothesis that Hitler and Braun used cyanide, but they only conducted toxicological tests that would have proven this on the first eleven corpses, and not on the remains of Hitler and Braun.”
In 1993, Russia announced that it had a fragment of Hitler’s skull that had been pierced by a bullet. However, when researchers at the University of Connecticut analyzed the bone in 2009 and extracted a DNA sample, they concluded it belonged to a woman – fueling theories that Hitler had indeed fled. Laurier believes that the provenance of the fragment remains unproven.
The obvious question is how such evidence could have survived if – as eyewitnesses claimed when questioned by Allied officers – his gasoline-doused corpse was burned and buried, along with Braun’s, after being taken outside the bunker.
While the Soviets claimed that troops had exhumed and reburied the fragments in Magdeburg, East Germany, other reports suggested that the KGB had recovered the skull fragments and transferred them to Moscow.
Whatever the reality, Laurier’s findings (socks and all) seem to reaffirm that truth is often stranger than fiction.