I know no one *really* knows what happened to Hitler, but...

[Rilchiam]

Inspired by the thread in IMHO asking how/if we would know if bin Laden was really dead, I'm wondering about Hitler's demise. To my knowledge, he went into his bunker and never came out, but that's the high-school-textbook explanation. And I know the speculations that he lived to a ripe old age in South America, but not what those speculations are based on. Can someone provide more details? I know there's no concrete answer, but what are some of the theories?

[Silentgoldfish]

Best of my knowledge, he went into his bunker and shot himself. Body was recovered and everything.

No cite, but I've never read differently in ANY history book.

[geepee]

Bunker thing married his wife made them take cyandide , then
this is disputed by his orderlines/officers:

shot himself in the head

or took cyanide and was shot in the head after to save face by his officers

then (this is also disputed) the bodies were doused in petrol and burnt , there being a body found with one testicle

[Earl Snake-Hips Tucker]

The KGB/NKVD (whatever it was called) archives game a lot of detail to Hitler's fate, when they became public in the past 10 years or so, since the Russkies were the first to arrive.

To sum it up, though, he shot himself, and I think his body was then set on fire. His remains were verified thru dental records. The Russkies then buried and reburied him in a number of places over the years.

[Duck Duck Goose]

Hitler's dental records.

http://www.fpp.co.uk/Hitler/docs/death/CorpseID2.html
Prof Michel Perrier with some of the photographic evidence used to confirm that remains found in 1945 were Hitler's The study of film footage of Hitler, enhanced by a computer, has confirmed that remains found by the Russians in 1945 were his, helping to end half a century of speculation about his fate and validating an identification technique of increasing value to forensic scientists...[more]
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0103/reviews/sundberg.html
On May 11, 1945 Soviet Army authorities brought a cigar box containing a partial jaw–bone and two dental bridges to Fritz Echtmann, a dental technician who had worked for Dr. Johann Hugo Blaschke, Adolf Hitler’s dentist since 1938. Echtmann identified one of the bridges from records. The Nazi dictator, the chief protagonist in a war that left fifty million people slaughtered, was finally confirmed dead.
So you can rest easy, babe. :D He's definitely dead.

Although, according to the Weekly World News (http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/features/revelations_story.cfm?instanceid=10720), he's not letting a little thing like being dead stop him from World Domination--he's coming baaaack...


:D

[Rilchiam]

Originally posted by Silentgoldfish
Best of my knowledge, he went into his bunker and shot himself. Body was recovered and everything.

No cite, but I've never read differently in ANY history book.

Well, I left middle school in 1984, and my school district had yet to get history books that mentioned Vietnam. Or that people had been to the moon. But I swear, it clearly stated, "There is evidence that Hitler and Eva took poison but this has not been confirmed" or words to that effect.

Also, my middle school history teacher was a veteran, and talked mostly about combat and military strategy. We were fascinated by that, and didn't notice that he said almost nothing about Hitler, for obvious reasons. In high school (different state), we didn't even get that far. We had to rush to get through the Great War before the end of term.

Thanks, though, for the info!

[DPWhite]

The History Channel has a pretty good documentary on exactly this subject. He took cyanide, shot himself, had body partially burned and buried. Soviets dug it up examined it, took the skull, reburied, etc. His death is about as well documented as historical figure.

[bibliophage]

The Perfect Master has discussed this. Questions about the authenticity of the Russian autopsy records were more or less resolved in 1972. Dr. Reidar Sognnaes, a dental expert at the University of California at Los Angeles, compared the Russky data with previous X-rays of Hitler's skull and pronounced the former genuine.

. . .

Why did the Russians wait so long to reveal the autopsy results? Trevor-Roper thinks Stalin arbitrarily decided that Hitler had escaped and compelled everybody else to go along. Later, he thinks, the Russians decided to keep things murky lest the Fuehrer's death and/or remains somehow inspire future generations of Nazis. They may have suppressed evidence about the bullet wounds in order to make Hitler's demise seem less heroic.

Others, of course, have their own ideas. They see the missing testicle as evidence that the man who died in 1945 was a double. They think the Russians faked the dental evidence for unknown reasons and that Maria Schickelgruber's grandson ended up leading a life of ease in some South American banana republic.

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_128b.html

[bonzer]

I was going to let this thread slid, but since nobody has provided the basic citations, here goes ...

As Cecil (http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_128b.html) has already sort of noted, in the immediate aftermath, with numerious rumours circulating about Adolf having done a runner, British Intelligence assigned one of their officers to investigate the circumstances of what happened in the Bunker. Not entirely coincidentally, the officer in question was in civilan life the promising young historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. His conclusion, based on the substantial eyewitness evidence, was published in bookform as The Last Days of Hitler (1947, multiple editions since). This is the basic "Hitler shot himself and the body was burnt" version that hasn't really been substantially challanged in its essence since. If you're interested in what happened, that's the main book to read.

There is evidence that Hitler and Eva took poison
He took cyanide

Kershaw (Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, Penguin, 2000, p1037-8) considers the evidence that he (in addition to Eva) took poison before firing the shot, but dismisses it. Basically, that version relies on witnesses who did not see the immediate aftermath of the suicide.

[Northern Piper]

For a detailed account based on researches in the Soviet archives, see: The Death of Hitler : The Full Story With New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives by Ada Petrova, Peter Watson (Contributor), 1996.