*BERLIN (Reuters) - Berlin construction workers have accidentally unearthed remnants of the bunker in which Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the closing days of World War Two, city authorities said on Friday.
The site of the bunker, sealed off by Red Army soldiers immediately after the capitulation of Berlin, was always known. But the re-appearance of the most symbolically charged Nazi relic of them all raises the question of what to do with it.*
What Adolf Hitler’s corpse be in the bunker? If not, where is it?
Jacques Kilchoer
Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
I just read that, too, on AP. But there’s really nothing left. The Russians grenaded the bunker after the war,then filled it with sand. So all they uncovered, really, is some metal support beams.
To the best of my knowledge after Adolf and his girlfriend offed themselves, some SS officers took the bodies outside, tossed them in a shell hole, soaked them in gasoline, and burned them. There was a fairly recent news story that the Russians apparently have Hitler’s skull and teeth filed away and these remains were confirmed as Hitler’s.
Did you hear the one about the neo-nazis that went down to Brazil and found an ancient Hitler hiding in the jungle? They begged him to come back and be their leader and he finally agreed, growling “but this time, no more mister nice guy!”
Claims to have a picture of Hitler’s skull, complete with bullet hole. Also featured is a photo of Hitler’s doppleganger’s body, used to fool the Allies.
P.S. In case it seems that my original question was “troll-like” because I say “I knew the official story about the body being burned”, let me rephrase it.
“Would Adolf Hitler’s body be near the bunker?”
As far as Russian troops finding it, that story always seemd slightly doubtful to me, because why not publicize the fact?
Of course, now another poster says that archives from the KGB/GRU support that story. I still don’t understand the secrecy.
Without commenting on the story, itself. I’d think that you can find a lot of fairly “innocent” information that was routinely suppressed by the U.S.S.R. (We’ve suppressed some fairly innocuous information, ourselves, but they were capable of classifying yesterday’s weather.)
tomndebb’s right. Stalinists don’t publicize anything except manipulative lies and propaganda. Plus, imagine how badly everyone wanted to get their hands on Adolf. It would be very difficult in 1945 to confirm the identity of a burnt body in a shell crater in the middle of an urban battlefield. Lastly, Hitler was into all kinds of supernatural mystical shit like astrology (besides being a vegetarian and a militant anti-smoker). Who needs his scuzzy remains becoming an object of pilgrimage and veneration? There are still plenty of people around who would treat his remains like that of a Catholic saint, enshrining them and idolizing them for all time. Remember the Panamanian dictator Noriega? He had a vast collection of nazi memorabilia. How about the dictator Pinochet? His army uniforms looked like pretty good copies of nazi crap, right down to the coal scuttle helmets. I think Saddam is also a big Hitler fan. One of the few things the commies did right was hiding (what might have been) Hitler’s remains in their archives.
An SS agent who claimed he was involved with the cremation testified that Hitler did not want his body captured by the Soviets and put on display like Lenin.
According to Cornelius Ryan in The Last Battle, an assistant to Hitler’s dentist positively identified a piece of bridgework that she helped apply to Hitler’s uppers in 1944 or 1945.
This was supposedly confirmed by a Soviet examination of the skull of one of the bodies that was burned outside of Hitler’s bunker.
However, Stalin’s Russia had already revised the story at least once, after they had first released photographs of Hitler’s dead double and then released official autopsies of the burnt body that indicated that Hitler took the cowardly option of taking cyanide along with Eva Braun. They further confused the story by later claiming that Hitler committed suicide by shooting himself though the roof of his mouth, although John Toland cites numerous eyewitnesses who say he shot himself in the right temple. Who the hell knows what those maniac Commies were thinking.
Eva Braun, Joseph Goebbels, and Goebbels’ family were killed by taking a rather new version of cyanide-based poison, which was first tested on Hitler’s dog for lethality.
Nobody of repute disputes the fact that Hitler committed suicide in his bunker complex in Berlin. The complex, thoroughly mapped and reproduced in several books including Ryan’s, covered some two acres, some of it underneath a park, in downtown Berlin.
It’s as close to Hell as any mortal could wish to get, in my opinion.
Groucho Marx was over in East Berlin and was taken to Hitler’s grave by soldiers when he asked to see it. At the grave Groucho danced on top of Hitler’s grave. This is according to Groucho in an interview.
There’s a book on this matter, published in 1996 (I think) called “The Death of Hitler” (I think). Sorry for the vagueness, but we’re reorganizing the study and I can’t find my copy.
The general theory is that the Soviets found the bodies of Hitler and Braun, and moved them to another spot, where they were buried. Later in the 50s, they dug them up again and destroyed them entirely. The purpose for the secrecy (as near as one can tell from a paranoid such as Stalin) was as tomndebb and Al Zheimers say - a combination of secrecy as a way of life, and a desire not to have any shrine.
They also say they have some bits and pieces in Moscow, such as a fragment of the skull, and some other artifacts, such as one of Hitler’s sketch books and a photo album. They also have some autopsy reports, taken around June of 1945.
JBenz: He danced a jig. With soldiers around I don’t think Groucho would have been allowed to do anything else (too bad!)… “I can no longer back and allow communist infiltration and indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodyily fluids.”-General Jack D Ripper
still haven’t found my copy, but got the info from Chapters:
Death of Hitler: The Full Story with New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives
By: Peter Watson, Ada Petrova
Published in 1996
I found it a bit over-written, and uneven - fascinating opening chapter on the detective work that the Allies put in right after the fall of Berlin to try to figure out what happened to Hitler et al., but then it lets the cat out too quickly with the answer, then carries on with dreary pathological details.
(there - a quick review - and if you order it from Chapters, make sure you mention me so I get a commission.)
“With soldiers around I don’t think Groucho would have been allowed to do anything else (too bad!)”
I don’t know about that. When the Allied armies reached the Rhine River, it was almost customary for troops to pee in the river as a symbol of contempt for the enemy. IIRC, Churchill and high-ranking generals did this, not just the ground-pounders.