In spring, 1945, as Allied powers encroached on German soil, Soviets from the east and the Western Allies from the west, Adolf Hitler and some of his closest advisors took refuge in the Führerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. At first, Hitler did not intend to remain underground there, in his small quarters with his lover Eva Braun. He intended to leave Berlin on his birthday, April 20th, and regroup in the more defensible Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden, but on the 19th, upon hearing that Soviet tanks had broken through the lines and were approaching Berlin, he changed his mind, enraged that his generals could be so incompetent and deciding that he would have to remain in Berlin in order to ensure the city would not fall. His birthday party, typically celebrated as a national holiday among Nazis, was a bleak affair as the fellow occupants of the bunker realized they may not make it out of Berlin alive. Shells shook the bunker faintly from their impact almost thirty feet overhead, and Hitler, who had once seemed supremely confident and commanding to his cult of followers now was stoop-backed, shaky, pale, and bleary-eyed. All of his lieutenants and officers feared telling him that hope was lost for Berlin, that the series of new counterattacks he initiated were all doomed to failure. Loyalists remained vigilant for any signs of disloyalty, which would have gotten them shot. Even leading figures of the party were deposed for some perceived treachery during Hitler’s final, paranoid days in the bunker—Hermann Göring, holder of the highest military rank in the Wehrmacht, a rank created just for him, was expelled from the party for even suggesting that Hitler may have been unable to lead from the embattled bunker, and Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, about whom I spoke in nauseating detail in my series on Nazi Occultism, was declared a traitor for attempting to negotiate a separate peace with Western Allies while Hitler remained in his bombarded bunker, unwilling to flee the city. As the military reality of their situation became apparent and formerly loyal party members appeared to be betraying him, Hitler began to openly talk about dying there in the bunker. “Now I shall remain in Berlin and die here,” he is reported to have stated. And it was more than just idle talk. Hitler began to talk to others in the bunker about using the cyanide capsules they had on hand to commit suicide when the Soviets came nearer the bunker, and as they did not have enough capsules for everyone, he spoke of some having to shoot themselves. He even tested the cyanide on his beloved dog, Blondi, forcing a broken capsule between the German Shepherd’s clenched teeth and watching her die. The more fanatical of his followers resigned themselves to sharing his fate. Chief Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, though he was to be made the leader of the Reich after Hitler’s suicide, was such a deluded ideologue that he could not imagine a world without his Führer. He had brought his family into the bunker, and he and his wife Magda began to make arrangements not only to kill themselves, but also to murder their six children. Eva Braun was eerily reconciled to her fate, happy only that Hitler finally agreed to marry her, right there in the bunker, the day before they took their lives together. She told one woman present in the air raid shelter that she chose poison because she wanted to leave a beautiful corpse behind. We know that, as Allied forces took Berlin and pushed toward the bunker, Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves in their private quarters, were carried, wrapped in blankets, out of the bunker, doused with gasoline, and burned in a bomb crater near the exit. Those present buried their remains before withdrawing back below ground to escape the shelling that continued. There, others, including the Goebbelses, also killed themselves, but not before ensuring that the Goebbels children were dead. We have knowledge of all these events from declassified files recording the interrogation of numerous eyewitnesses who were present and after the suicides tried to flee the city but were caught, as well as from several memoirs later written by the same witnesses. And yet, Hitler’s ghost would continue to haunt the world in the form of numerous rumors, persisting even to today, that he did not die in that bunker in 1945.

To many, it may seem like conspiracy theories and claims about Hitler’s escape from Germany are a relatively recent phenomenon. There is a reason for that. The Soviets were the ones who first reached the bunker, who captured most of the witnesses to Hitler’s final days, and who even claimed to have recovered Hitler’s remains, and much of the evidence and documentation of what happened was long locked up in Russian archives, with minimal access being granted to Western historians throughout the Cold War. This did not prevent British and American intelligence services from conducting their own investigations and interviews of witnesses, both in the aftermath of Berlin’s fall and ten years later, when Soviets released the last of their Nazi prisoners to face justice in German courts. The most prominent of these investigations, conducted by British historian and intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper and published in 1947 as The Last Days of Hitler, determined without any need for physical evidence of his remains that Hitler had killed himself in the bunker. Trevor-Roper’s conclusions remained consensus history, with only some minor disagreement about whether Hitler had shot himself or taken poison. In the year 2000, after the collapse of the USSR and the rise of young KGB lieutenant Vladimir Putin to power, some effort was made to open the archives, specifically those relating to the death of Hitler, in order to remind the world that they had Russia to thank for his downfall. In a Moscow exhibition called “Agony of the Third Reich – the Punishment,” they displayed numerous Top Secret reports and photographs to recreate the events in the bunker, and their pièce de resistance, a skull with a bullet hole in it claimed to be Hitler’s, appeared to settle the matter of whether Hitler had shot himself. However, in 2009, on behalf of a History Channel program called MysteryQuest, University of Connecticut archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni examined a fragment of this skull, provided by the producers of the program, and determined that it actually belonged to a woman. From there, the floodgates to conspiracy were opened. The most popular book to claim that Hitler escaped the bunker was and remains Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler, and its success has spawned others, like that of far-right conspiracist Jerome Corsi, prominent proponent of the swiftboat claims about John Kerry, birther claims about Barack Obama, and claims of Deep State conspiracy against the Trump administration, and most recently, a whole book full of climate change denialism, a book distributed by Simon & Schuster –come on, Simon & Schuster. If you’re going to sell harmful garbage like that, at least try to balance it out by giving me a book deal! And not to be outdone by conspiracist book publishers, the History Channel has been back in the game with Hunting Hitler, which they gave three full seasons and a feature-length special between 2015 and 2020. If there is anything that making this podcast has taught me, it’s that the History Channel is perhaps the world’s biggest promoter of pseudohistory and conspiracist nonsense, second only to that one aunty who shares fake news on social media, perhaps, but far more sinister because of their perceived authority. The truth of the matter is, though, that rumors of Hitler’s survival, many of which these books and programs repeat as though they represent evidence, go all the way back to the immediate aftermath of the fall of Berlin, and ironically, they seem to have originated with the very people who have claimed to possess physical evidence of Hitler’s death: the Soviets themselves.

The Fuhrerbunker before its destruction. **Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-V04744 / CC-BY-SA 3.0**

On the 1st of May, 1945, Russians received an official message from Goebbels to the effect that Hitler had taken his own life and that power had been transferred others, including himself. He made no mention of the fact that he intended to kill himself as well. Stalin’s reaction is recorded in a reply message to his general in charge of the siege of Berlin: “So that’s the end of the bastard. Too bad he couldn’t be taken alive.” Efforts immediately turned to recovering his body. The next day, the Red Army finally penetrated the bunker and discovered the bodies of those who had killed themselves after Hitler and Eva Braun’s funeral: Generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Hans Krebs, a head bodyguard of Hitler’s, Franz Schädle, and Joseph and Magda Goebbels. They also found the corpses of the six Goebbels children. The next day, they discovered more bodies in an oak water tank, and one of them, who had been shot right between the eyes, looked remarkably like Adolf Hitler, with the little mustache and everything. Soviets sent this corpse to Moscow, presuming it to be the Führer’s body. The day after that, as they sifted through the crater near the bunker exit, some legs were seen, but believing they had already recovered Hitler’s corpse, these burnt remains, which are now believed to have been Hitler and his wife, were covered back up. Only on the 5th of May did the search resume, after learning that the body they had discovered in the tank was probably that of Gustav Weler, a lookalike who had previously been arrested for impersonating Hitler and may have been executed and left as a decoy. So the burnt remains of a man and woman were removed from the crater. Russian intelligence services, who would capture and interrogate all the most important witnesses to Hitler’s death, would confirm that these bodies were those of Hitler and Eva Braun, and would collect further evidence, based on the testimony of Hitler’s dentists, to positively identify his corpse. Their forensic examination would assert that they both died of cyanide poisoning. All of this was kept as a state secret, however. The bodies themselves were spirited away by the Soviet counter-espionage group, SMERSH, and after their identification and autopsy, they were buried anonymously in the little German town of Rathenow. And then, strangely, despite accepting intelligence reports that confirmed Hitler’s death as well as the recovery and identification of his corpse, Joseph Stalin started telling the world that Hitler had escaped. He told the diplomatic representative of the new U.S. President, Harry Truman, that Hitler was in hiding, along with Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann, all of whom had escaped the bunker, something he must have known was certainly not accurate in the case of Goebbels. Then, at the Potsdam Conference in July, he suggested Hitler was hiding in Spain, or Japan, or perhaps in Chile or Argentina. His claims were carried to the world via sensational news reports. We see the birth of a myth here, as Stalin’s claims were thereafter trumpeted to the world by the eager press, and soon belief in Hitler’s escape from Berlin was widespread.

Why would Stalin start this rumor, knowing that his intelligence services believed they had discovered Hitler’s body? Some have suggested that Stalin really believed what he claimed, that he doubted his own intelligence services’ reports or felt the autopsy results could not be relied on. However, the fact that he made similar claims about Goebbels, whose remains were certainly identified, and that he never even mentioned the existence of the remains as possibly being Hitler’s suggests he held some other motives. He treated the burned remains believed to be Hitler as a state secret from the beginning. His anti-espionage agency, SMERSH, actually stole the remains from the Soviet forces who had unearthed them, and the autopsy was conducted in secret. And later, he would have the remains secretly destroyed. All signs indicate that Stalin determined to use the knowledge of Hitler’s death as a disinformation tool. By suggesting he was being harbored by Franco in Spain or Perón in Argentina, he could direct the attention of his Western Allies against other dictators, fascist dictators that he disliked. At one point, when one of his generals slipped up and indicated that Hitler’s body had been identified, Stalin forced him to retract the statement, and had him instead state that “Now it is up to you British and Americans to find him.” He was purposely sending the Allies on a wild goose chase, keeping them busy and pitting them against other dictators. The Cold War was begun, and he wanted to destabilize his capitalist rivals. Eventually, Stalin even suggested that the British were harboring Hitler themselves in their zone of Berlin, and that was the last straw for British intelligence, who organized Hugh Trevor-Roper’s investigation in response. Even without the bunker witnesses, whom the Soviets still held, the British were able to discern that Hitler had killed himself and that the Russians were not telling all they knew. So they released their findings, hoping to force the hand of the Russians to acknowledge that they had evidence of Hitler’s demise. And it worked, though not exactly how they anticipated. The Soviet intelligence service, the NKVD, launched a new inquiry, returning to the Fühererbunker to photograph everything and search for further evidence. This initiative was called, in translation, “Operation Myth.”

The Fuhrerbunker after the fall of Berlin. **Attribution: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-M1204-318 / Donath, Otto / CC-BY-SA 3.0**

The name of this Soviet operation itself has created plenty of confusion. Some have erroneously stated that “Operation Myth” was the name for Stalin’s disinformation campaign to make the world believe Hitler had survived, but that is not the case. Some suggest that the name indicate that the operation was intended to produce further disinformation, casting doubt on their findings, but more likely the name was meant to suggest that the operation would finally refute the growing myth of Hitler’s survival. In any case, their investigation collected further evidence of Hitler’s death, much of which contradicted the claims of their rival intelligence branch, SMERSH, who had asserted in their report that Hitler had killed himself with poison. They collected pieces of a couch with blood stains on it, which they tested and asserted were of Hitler’s blood type. Sifting through the earth of the crater from which the burnt remains believed to be Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had been unearthed, they also discovered the skull fragment with the bullet hole in it that would cause such controversy years later. Finally, they hauled key witnesses out of their Soviet prisons to interrogate and cross-interrogate them again: Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, Hans Baur, his personal pilot, and Otto Günsche, his aide-de-camp. These were the witnesses in the bunker whom Hugh Trevor-Roper most wanted to question, and from them they confirmed that Hitler and Eva Braun had withdrawn to their room to kill themselves, that there was blood on the floor and wall afterward as well as the strong smell of almonds indicating the presence of cyanide poison, and that they afterward were carried out in blankets to be burned outside the bunker. Not all the witnesses recalled hearing a gunshot, but still, much of the evidence indicated perhaps some combination of poisoning and self-inflicted gunshot wound had occurred. But this did not accord well with SMERSH’s supposed autopsy findings that both had poisoned themselves, which findings may only have been what they believed Stalin wanted to hear, that Hitler had taken a coward’s death rather than a more soldierly death. When the NKVD operatives conducting Operation Myth requested access to the burnt remains so that they could conduct a new autopsy, their rivals in SMERSH refused, and since the remains would later be destroyed on orders from the Kremlin, it seemed it would be impossible to ever discern whether the skull fragment with the bullet hole in it found outside the bunker was indeed from the burnt remains discovered in the same place. And so, despite his own intelligence services conducting two separate investigations that both demonstrated that Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves, using either poison or a pistol or both, Joseph Stalin single-handedly created the myth of Hitler’s survival, and Russia would not share its findings until long after the myth had spread across the world.

Starting later that summer, the Hitler survival rumor turned into something of a hysteria across the Atlantic, when Americans, believing the sensational news reports about Hitler’s escape filtering in from overseas, began suspecting everyone around them of being Hitler. The man next most responsible for the spread of the Hitler survival myth after Stalin was J. Edgar Hoover, who since we last left him had built up his BOI into a very powerful domestic surveillance and policing organization that had been renamed the FBI. As I noted in my previous episode on the Business Plot, Hoover was a fearmonger, constantly building up anxieties about an “enemy within” the country to justify his bureau’s existence and expand its investigatory powers. Some have suggested that he really was a paranoiac, citing his interest in UFOs, his promotion of the second Red Scare, et cetera, but it is not at all clear whether he really was paranoid about these supposed threats or if he only viewed them as useful threats he could point to when justifying the powers of his FBI. Like Stalin before him, it’s not certain whether he really believed Hitler was still alive or just used the rumor for propaganda purposes. What we do know is that as newspapers began printing articles about Hitler sightings in America, he devoted a great deal of manpower to investigating them, and when everyday people started writing to him personally about their supposed sightings of the Führer, he responded to them and investigated. He tasked something like a thousand agents with running down these supposed leads on Hitler, many of which can be read today from declassified FBI files obtained through Freedom of Information requests. Some were as simple as pet theories, like someone’s hunch that Hitler must be in New York because that would be a good city in which to hide, and some were just the sharing of newspaper articles that speculated about his survival. The National Police Gazette, which was something of a combination of what today we would consider a men’s lifestyle magazine and a tabloid rag, was the biggest purveyor of these theories and sightings. Then there were genuine leads, from people who claimed to know someone who had seen him or helped him, or to know where he was, though he looked different, having shaved his signature mustache or undergone plastic surgery. Conspiracy books like Grey Wolf make much use of these declassified FBI reports, as if each provides evidence of Hitler’s escape, when in fact, each contradictory report goes to prove that such sightings were false. And while conspiracists love to point to the tips the FBI received, they don’t typically follow up by discussing the FBI’s findings. Agents ran down every lead they received and never found convincing evidence of Hitler’s presence in the U.S. Rather, as with their intelligence services counterparts, who were also investigating such rumors, they found that each lead could be attributed to hysteria, a desire to create a sensation, a sympathy for Nazism leading to attempts to create a myth about Hitler triumphing by surviving, a hope of receiving money for false information, the intention to falsely accuse someone that was disliked as in a witch hunt, and good old-fashioned mental illness.

Photo of the skull fragment purported to be from Hitler’s remains. Courtesy University of Connecticut.

Many of the supposed Hitler sightings from that era and the conspiracist scenarios that abound in media today revolve around Argentina, where the dictator Juan Perón, who had received money from the Nazi regime, might have been amenable to harboring them, and where there was a thriving German expatriate community in place. So numerous were the rumors that Hitler had been smuggled by submarine to Argentina and was living in lakeside luxury in Patagonia that J. Edgar Hoover actually sent FBI agents to Argentina to investigate. On its surface, this theory hold some merit because there were known escape routes, known as ratlines, for Nazis fleeing Europe, and Argentina did harbor some extremely high level Nazis, including Adolph Eichmann, a major architect of the Holocaust, and Joseph Mengele, a ghoulish doctor who performed horrifying experiments on concentration camp prisoners and was called the Angel of Death. However, in order to even entertain the notion that Hitler escaped via ratline to Argentina, we must disregard the evidence for his suicide that came to light following Hugh Trevor-Roper’s investigation and has continued to come to light ever since, which I will try to sum up shortly. It is true that some present in the bunker did flee after the suicides, but none actually escaped. For a long time, it was rumored that Martin Bormann, the head of the Nazi party chancellery, who did indeed flee the bunker, had escaped the Allies. Because of this, he was tried for war crimes in absentia at Nuremberg, but eventually, this rumor too was laid to rest with the discovery of his remains in 1965, remains that were confirmed by DNA testing to be Bormann’s in 1998. Thus there is no evidence that Hitler or other major figures present in the Führerbunker escaped to Argentina, and as the FBI and historians since have determined, all the accounts of Hitler’s presence in Argentina were unreliable hearsay reports about some suspicious German expatriate or other, perhaps even an escaped Nazi like Eichmann or Mengele, but not Hitler himself. Yet that has not stopped conspiracists like the authors of Grey Wolf or the producers of Hunting Hitler from spinning yarns about Hitler and Eva Braun settling in some picturesque lakeside mansion and raising a daughter together while Hitler plotted a “Fourth Reich,” all of which is pure fantasy.

The evidence overwhelmingly favors Hitler dying by suicide and being burned outside his bunker, as Linge, Baur, and Günsche all independently swore under grueling interrogation to have happened. Beyond this eyewitness testimony, though, there is the further record of Hitler’s will, dictated inside the bunker and recovered by British and American intelligence in the aftermath of the fall of Berlin, which specifically states his intention to die, or “to choose death voluntarily,” rather than be taken by enemies and being tried in some sort of “a spectacle arranged by Jews.” Witnesses in the bunker also describe Hitler’s dread at learning what had become of Benito Mussolini, whose corpse had been hung by its feet in Milan and mutilated, a fate that, according to Hans Baur, he greatly feared. Psychologically, it seems, Hitler was quite capable of suicide. As we have seen, he encouraged it among his followers. Surely Joseph and Magda Goebbels, for example, would not have taken their lives of their six children and killed themselves if they were not certain that their beloved Führer was already dead. And this Nazi tendency to suicide was not just a product of the dreadful situation within the bunker. The SS were known for their use of cyanide ampoules, and Hitler even encouraged soldiers on the front to turn their weapons on themselves rather than surrender. Suicide was viewed as a loyal act by the Nazis. Add to this Hitler’s unimaginable ego, which many believed would not allow him to go from being the belligerent dictator of millions to living the obscure life of a country hermit, and we may see the further appeal that suicide held for him. Lastly, Hitler was not a well man, and the statements of witnesses in the Führerbunker emphasize his dramatic deterioration during his last days. He had long suffered from digestive problems, perhaps due to IBS or colitis, and there are indications that his tremors, his stooping, and his shuffling walk may have been the result of Parkinson’s or late-stage syphilis. These issues cause us to doubt that Hitler was physically well enough to escape by fleeing through the city, beset as it was by Soviet forces. We further know that he was something of a hypochondriac and drug addict, taking a great many narcotic medications, including cocaine solutions and intravenous methamphetamines, along with testosterone injections, which in combination could very easily have contributed to suicidal ideation under these extreme circumstances.

Images of the teeth and jaw fragment held in Russian archives. Fair Use.

Finally, we must remember that, despite those who cry “produce the body,” the fundamental right of habeus corpus actually refers to producing the body of a prisoner being detained to allow claims of unlawful imprisonment. It does not mean that physical remains are the only way to prove a death. Nevertheless, even though Soviets destroyed the remains believed to be Hitler and Eva Braun, Soviet records of the bodies remain, as do some crucial pieces of physical evidence. First, the skull fragment with the bullet hole. It is true that we haven’t absolutely confirmed this fragment belonged to one of the corpses recovered, but it’s also true that the 2009 claim that it belonged to a young woman has been challenged. Russian archivists assert that the History Channel was never permitted to handle or take a sample of the skull, even providing evidence in the form of their visitor logs, and History Channel representatives have been cagey about the provenance of the sample tested by University of Connecticut archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni. Moreover, famed French paleopathologist Philippe Charlier did later examine the skull fragment, as chronicled in the 2018 work The Death of Hitler: The Final Word, and rejected the notion that Bellantoni could possibly determine the sex or age of the remains based solely on the density and sutures visible on the skull fragment, and confirmed that the bullet hole looked consistent with an exit word from a bullet being fired into the temple, as Heinz Linge had stated, and that the skull fragment showed definite signs of having been burned at high temperatures and buried beneath soil for some time. He also determined, based on the witness testimony, the photographic evidence, and analysis of the blood spattered furniture fragments in Russian archives, that evidence from the scene of the suicide corroborates the idea that Hitler shot himself in the side of the head, further suggesting that there may be a way to make certain of this and to determine once and for all whether the skull fragment belonged to the burned corpse that had been destroyed decades earlier.

As it turns out, the teeth and a portion of the jaw taken from those burned remains that were recovered from the crater and identified by Hitler’s dentist as belonging to him remained in a separate archive of Soviet records, further demonstrating how divided the investigation had been between rival Soviet intelligence agencies. Charlier suggested that the teeth could be matched to the skull fragment, and if there were no trace of gunpowder on them, a case could be made that Hitler shot himself, not in the mouth as some said, but in the temple as Linge had said, and that the teeth could further be tested for traces of cyanide. With the help of the authors who had worked to get him access to the separate archives, Charlier was able to examine the teeth and jaw fragment as well. His findings were published in 2018 in the European Journal of Internal Medicine. Morphological analysis showed that the jaw may belong to the same remains as the skull fragment, that no gunpowder residue was present on the teeth, and that there is evidence consistent with the interaction of cyanide with the fillings. These findings are not certain, as DNA testing would be required to determine with any certainty that the skull fragment and jaw were from the same individual, and that individual’s cause of death still cannot be pinpointed as either self-inflicted gunshot or cyanide poisoning, but it must be remembered that the teeth were identified, in detail, by Hitler’s dentists, who drew pictures of not only his teeth but also the unusual dental prosthesis they installed for him. Furthermore, Charlier was able to compare them to x-rays of Hitler’s face that had since been discovered, allowing him to confirm they were Hitler’s teeth and jaw. This, in conjunction with the overwhelming amount of witness testimony, is enough to prove to any but the most congenitally distrustful that Hitler did not effect some daring or triumphant escape, but rather that he died a coward’s death in a hole in the ground, taking women and children with him. And it is very telling that Bellantoni, the archaeologist who claimed to have debunked the skull fragment, as well as the “experts” interviewed on Hunting History, all publicly denied actually believing that Hitler survived the bunker after the 2018 publication of Charlier’s findings. According to them, they weren’t actually saying Hitler had escaped. They had been careful not to say that. Rather, they were just happy to pour fuel on the fires of conspiracy delusions and to enjoy the publicity and the money with which the History Channel rewarded them.

The x-ray of Hitler that allowed the final definitive identification of his remains. Courtesy the National Library of Medicine.

Until next time, remember that the History Channel can be ranked alongside Joseph Stalin as one of history’s biggest promoters of lies. Come at me, History Channel… unless you want to give me a lucrative programming deal. Then let’s talk.

The Specter of Hitler's Survival

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