That is, assuming they actually did. Per Wikipedia,
What would have been the point? Thanks…
Prevent it becoming a site of pilgrimage.
They also didn’t confirm that they’d found his charred corpse for years and years. Even Marshall Zhukov, who had captured the freaking city, was kept in the dark by the NKVD and was furious when he eventually found out.
The treatment of his body is in line with the overall denazification of post-war Germany by the rest of the Allies. The Nazis that went to the gallows at Nuremberg were cremated also had their ashes scattered for similar reasons.
A related question: why did the Russians demand that Landsberg Prison be kept open for one man? The guy who flew to Scotland and was largely out of WWII-he was kept till he died, after which the prison was demolished.
You mean Spandau?
But if no one outside the Kremlin even *knew * where they were buried or, reportedly, that they’d previously been moved about…was word of the bodies’ location starting to leak to the public? I know, who knows…
I have to say, that account of Hess’s stay is waaay out of line with what I commonly believe these brutal Russian gulags to be. Where was Stalin during all this? Why were they coddling Hess for his hypochondria? Why wasn’t he forced to lie naked in the cold floor if he was unwilling to do the daily chores everyone else had to?
Sure but better safe than sorry!
It wasn’t a Soviet prison, it was run by all four (former) allies on, iirc, a rotating monthly basis.
Spandau was in West Berlin, not behind the Iron Curtain. Stalin could influence, but not control.
To answer the OP -
For the same reason Israel scattered Eichmann’s ashes in the sea: hatred.
Ditto Osama, of course.
The account I read of the demise of Adolf Hitler was as in Konrad Heiden’s “Der Fuhrer”. According to this account, Hitler shot himself, Eva Braun died from poison. The bodies were dragged to the surface, placed in a bomb crater, then soaked with gasoline. They were then set alight-and gasoline was poured over them so as to keep the fire going. What was left? Most likely, some charred skeletons. I doubt that a positive ID was possible until Hitler’s dental records were found. So, was there any reason to retain the remains?
Incidentally, once Hitler was dead, did anybody remain in the bunker? By that time, it was best to get out of Berlin-unless you wanted the tender mercies of the Red Army.
An overview on the subject - Stalin was particularly fascinated with the fate of Hitler and dedicated a SMERSH detachment of the Third Guards Shock Army to the hunt for his body - and secret it away if it were found, even from fellow Soviets. For years they denied anything for Cold War propaganda reasons.
From the link;
The Soviets captured the bunker on May 2nd - there were a couple of breakouts (one of which got Bormann killed) but there were some still in the bunker who promptly surrendered.
I doubt the location of the prison had much to do with it. It was the fact that the prison was run by the four Allies jointly that prevented any one of them from acting unilaterally. The Soviets (and their puppet German government) were just as powerless to make unilateral decisions about certain administrative issues in the East. A notable example was East Germany’s Zwangsumtausch law, which required all Western visitors to exchange a set amount of foreign currency at very unfavourable rates. The law was ignored with impunity by the western Allies, who did not recognize the GDR as having the authority to supersede the quadrilateral agreement concerning activities of their military personnel in Berlin.
Is it just a coincidence that the remains were kept for almost precisely 25 years? It almost seems lke someone at the end of the war decreed that they, like captured files, should be destroyed after a set amount of time.
In case anyone is wondering why the remains were crushed after burning; even a proper crematorium leaves lots of bone fragments, some of the quite large. In the West these are fed into a special machine which grinds them into a course powder (what people normally think as “ash”, the proper term is cremains).
It was just coincidental that Hess happened to be the last surviving prisoner. Keeping Hess prisoner meant that Spandau remained an active site - and that meant the Soviets had ongoing official access to West Berlin.
No, the Soviets already had official access to West Berlin. Each of the four occupying powers had the right to militarily patrol each other’s sectors. Besides which, Spandau wasn’t the only site in West Berlin which the Soviets controlled alone or jointly; there was also the Soviet War Memorial in the Großer Tiergarten.
Is it any wonder any of these cunts’ corpses were pulverised?
Yes, apparently it is, or else the OP never would have asked.