Not to piss on the prominent historians, but it sounds like everything we “know” about about what happened to Hitler is little more than rumors. We know that there are reports he committed suicide, and the Soviets claim to have recovered a charred copse that they thought was his, but that’s about it. And as far as anyone knows, this was the first attempt to apply any real science to the issue.
Actually, Trevor-Roper had rather more than just ‘rumors’. Instead what he had was the chance to interrogate quite a few of the survivors from the bunker while they were still in Allied custody. That meant that he was doing so soon after the event, when their memories were still fresh and before they had the chance to coordinate or polish their stories. Most importantly, he grasped that the key to the problem was cross-referencing the different accounts to work out who was telling the truth about which specific details. That’s why other historians have found his conclusions so convincing.
Well, the burning of Hitler’s body was witnessed by about a dozen Germans, some half-dozen of them who survived well into the 21st century.
The skull is meaningless except as a token of how crazy Stalin and SMERSH was about the idea they needed to keep the location of Hitler’s body a secret and keep his death in confusion: (wiki) Different versions of Hitler’s fate were presented by the Soviet Union according to its political desires. In the years immediately following 1945, the Soviets maintained Hitler was not dead, but had fled and was being shielded by the former western allies.[52] This worked for a time to create doubt among western authorities.
Hitlers body was moved, reburied and even destroyed several times: *The remains of Hitler and Braun were repeatedly buried and exhumed by SMERSH during the unit’s relocation from Berlin to a new facility in Magdeburg. The bodies, along with the charred remains of propaganda minister Goebbels, his wife Magda, and their six children, were buried in an unmarked grave beneath a paved section of the front courtyard. The location was kept secret…In 1970, the SMERSH facility, by then controlled by the KGB, was scheduled to be handed over to the East German government. Fearing that a known Hitler burial site might become a Neo-Nazi shrine, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains that had been buried in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946.[57] A Soviet KGB team was given detailed burial charts. On 4 April 1970 they secretly exhumed five wooden boxes containing the remains of “10 or 11 bodies … in an advanced state of decay”. The remains were thoroughly burned and crushed, after which the ashes were thrown into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.[58]
According to Ian Kershaw the corpses of Braun and Hitler were thoroughly burned when the Red Army found them, and only a lower jaw with dental work could be identified as Hitler’s remains.[59]*
The skull fragment was foudn later, and was never confirmed to be Hitlers: In May 1946, SMERSH agents recovered from the crater where Hitler was buried two burned skull fragments with gunshot damage. These remains were apparently forgotten in the Russian State Archives until 1993, when they were re-found The skull could have been that of Eva Braun, I suppose.