Adolf Hitler may not have shot himself dead and perhaps did not even die in his bunker, it emerged yesterday.
A skull fragment believed for decades to be the Nazi leader’s has turned out to be that of a woman under 40 after DNA analysis.
Scientists and historians had long thought it to be conclusive proof that Hitler shot himself in the head after taking a cyanide pill on 30 April 1945 rather than face the ignominy of capture.
Hitlers supposed skull
The piece of skull – complete with bullet hole – had been taken from outside the Fuhrer’s bunker by the Russian Army and preserved by Soviet intelligence.
Now the story of Hitler’s death will have to rewritten as a mystery – and conspiracy theorists are likely to latch on to the possibility that he may not have died in the bunker at all.
The skull was taken by Soviet forces in 1945 when they found charred remains outside the Nazi dictator’s bunker in Berlin.
The Russians said at the time that the findings backed claims that Hitler had shot himself on April 30, 1945, and then been cremated along with his wife, Eva Braun.
Adolf Hitler with Eva Braun
Now, however, archaeologist and bone specialist Nick Bellantoni says the skull really belonged to a woman aged under 40 and not Hitler – who was 56 when he died.
Neither does Mr Bellantoni believe the skull belongs to Braun, Hitler’s long-time girlfriend and last-minute wife, who is thought to have killed herself by taking cyanide and would therefore not have had a bullet wound – as this skull has.
The Russians say they have never claimed the skull itself was the chief reason for their belief the skull was Hitler’s.
Instead, they point to dental records as confirmation that Hitler killed himself.
Some historians have believed for years that the Nazi dictator did not die in Berlin.
“There is no forensic evidence whatsoever that Hitler died in the bunker,” historian and journalist Gerrard Williams told Sky News Online.
Soviet troops guard the remains of Hitlers bunker
“The Nazi high command had been making plans since 1943 to get out of Germany and to set up a Fourth Reich mainly in South America so they had no need to die in situ in Germany.
“There was a very effective route out of Germany to South America and the Nazis had help from various factions, in particular a Croatian cardinal from the Vatican called Alois Hudel.
“As for the dental records, they were destroyed on the orders on Martin Borman in 1944. So there were no records on top Nazi leaders with which to compare the charred findings.”
One reason why there was such a belief at the end of World War II that the skull was Hitler’s, Mr Williams suggests, is that everyone needed Hitler to be dead.
“Everyone wanted to close the chapter very quickly because, of course, the Cold War was just starting up. It was convenient, that’s all.”
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September 30th, 2009 at 12:07 am
A bone fragment believed to be part of Adolf Hitler’s skull has been revealed as being that of an unidentified woman, US scientists have said.
The section of bone – marked with a bullet hole – was used to support the theory that Hitler shot himself.
Russian scientists said the skull piece was found alongside Hitler’s jawbone and had put it on display in Moscow.
But US scientists said DNA tests revealed it actually belonged to a woman aged between 20 and 40.
An archaeologist from the University of Connecticut travelled to Moscow, where the fragment has been on show in the city’s federal archive since 2000, to take a sample.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8281839.stm
October 9th, 2009 at 8:49 pm
HARTFORD, Connecticut — A piece of skull with a bullet hole through it that Russian officials claimed belonged to Adolf Hitler actually came from a woman, scientists at the University of Connecticut have concluded.
The cranium fragment is part of a collection of Hitler artifacts preserved by Soviet intelligence in the months after Hitler and Eva Braun reportedly committed suicide in a Berlin bunker in April 1945.
The collection, now housed in the Russian State Archive in Moscow, also includes bloodstained pieces of the sofa where Hitler reportedly shot himself after taking a cyanide pill. The artifacts were put on display in 2000.
Connecticut archaeologist Nick Bellantoni was asked to examine the skull and blood samples for a History Channel documentary on Hitler’s death that aired this month. He said his initial forensic exam of the skull fragment showed that it did not match what he knew of Hitler’s biology.
“The bone was very small and thin, and normally male bones are much more robust in our species,” Bellantoni said Tuesday. “I thought it probably came from a woman or a younger man.”
Bellantoni then took several pinhead-sized pieces of the skull fragment and swabs of the bloodstains back to the university for analysis.
Linda Strausbaugh, a professor of molecular and cell biology, got help from two former students who work in the New York City medical examiner’s office. They were able to extract enough DNA from the bone pieces to do a forensic study, Strausbaugh said.
She said they determined that the DNA came from a 20- to 40-year-old woman. The skull fragment could have come from Braun, but to know that, the lab would need samples of her DNA. The samples were very degraded, making identification unlikely, Strausbaugh said.
Witnesses never reported Braun being shot in the head, Bellantoni said, and she is thought to have died of cyanide poisoning.
“This person, with a bullet hole coming out the back of the head, would have been shot in the face, in the mouth or underneath the chin,” he said. “It would have been hard for them to miss that.”
DNA from the bloodstain swabs showed at least some of it came from a man, Strausbaugh said.
“The DNA is relatively degraded and we don’t have a full range of markers that we’d like to have,” she said.
Russian officials have said Hitler and Braun’s bodies were removed from a shell crater outside the bunker shortly after they died. An autopsy allegedly showed Hitler’s body was missing part of his cranium. A Soviet team went back to the crater in 1946 and allegedly found the piece of cranium that the UConn scientists examined.
Russian officials have said the rest of Hitler was buried beneath a Soviet army parade ground in the former East German city of Magdeburg. They said his remains were exhumed in 1970 and incinerated, and the ashes were flushed into the city’s sewage system.
Both Strausbaugh and Bellantoni said there was nothing in their findings that significantly challenged the conclusion that Hitler died in the bunker.
“My gut feeling is he did commit suicide there, and maybe the blood sample we found is his,” Bellantoni said.
“What this does is it raises a question: If this is not him who is it?” he later added. “And, two, what really happened there?”
November 4th, 2009 at 10:37 pm
The owner of the house where Adolf Hitler was born wants to put it on the market with a likely asking price of over £2million.
But the local authority in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria, has vowed to try to find a way of blocking any sale because it fears it could land up in the hands of extreme right-wingers who would turn it into a grotesque shrine to his memory.
The mayor of Braunau, Gerhard Skiba, said ideally the town council would like to purchase it and so control its future fate.
But there is not enough money in the town coffers to buy the property, Salzburger Vorstadt 15.
He says he will appeal to the government in Vienna to help the town purchase the property if the owner goes ahead with the sale.
It was in a room on the first floor of the three-storey, 2,000 square foot house – the ground floor of which was a pub called Gasthof Zum Pommer – that Hitler’s mother Klara gave birth to her infamous son on April 20, 1889.
She and her husband Alois, a stern local customs official, rented a suite of rooms above the pub and continued to live in it until 1892 when they moved to Linz.
Alois, a drunkard, often availed himself of the beer on sale in the saloon downstairs before returning to the family home to abuse his timid wife 24 years his junior.
The house is still owned by the family after which the pub took its name. Owner Gelinde Pommer says she wants to sell because the tenants for the past two decades, handicapped people who worked and lived there under the care of a disabled organisation, are moving to more modern premises in January, and she no longer wants to have the responsibility for it.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1225268/Hitlers-house-goes-sale-2m-price-tag–authorities-fear-fascist-shrine.html#ixzz0Vwslt3Qu
December 10th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Russian secret service officials claim they have genuine fragments of the skull of Adolf Hitler and have dismissed American reports which suggest it belongs to a woman.
Vassili Khristoforov, head of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), said: ‘The FSB archives hold the jaw of Hitler and the state archives a fragment of Hitler’s skull.
‘With the exception of these remains, seized on May 5, 1945, there exist no other bits from the body of Hitler.’
In September academics from the University of Connecticut, in the US, said their DNA analysis showed the skull fragment to be that of a woman, aged between 20 and 40.
But they did not test the jawbone, and that, say the Russians, is positively male.
The researchers had not approached the FSB archives about testing the jawbone, said Khristoforov.
‘And even if they had the DNA of our fragments, with what could they then have compared it?’ he asked.
‘These remains are unique, there is nothing comparable. We are talking about the only evidence of this kind of the death of Hitler, and that is why the FSB had kept it in its archives.’
The American report in October inflamed speculation that Hitler may have escaped from the blazing ruins of Berlin in 1945 instead of taking his own life in the bunker.
The piece of skull – complete with bullet hole – had been taken from outside the Fuhrer’s bunker by the Russian Army and preserved by Soviet intelligence.
The traditional story is that Hitler committed suicide with his lover Eva Braun as the Russians bombarded Berlin.
Although some historians doubted he shot himself and suggested it was Nazi propaganda to make him a hero, the hole in the skull fragment seemed to settle the argument when it was put on display in Moscow in 2000.
According to witnesses, the bodies of Hitler and Braun were wrapped in blankets and carried to the garden just outside the bunker, placed in a bomb crater, doused with petrol and set ablaze.
In May 1945 a Russian forensics team dug up what was presumed to be the dictator’s body. Part of the skull was missing, apparently the result of the suicide shot. The remaining piece of jaw matched his dental records, according to his captured dental assistants. And there was only one testicle.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1234131/Hitler-skull-fragments-genuine-insist-Russians.html#ixzz0ZIzUwHRG
January 12th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
A tape recording of Nazi officers describing the moment they found Adolf Hitler’s body in his Berlin bunker has been discovered.
The recording was made on October 25 1956 in a courtroom in Berchtesgaden, site of the Fuehrer’s mountaintop home in Bavaria. The court was convened to officially declare the former leader of Nazi Germany dead so that his fortune and rights to his book “Mein Kampf” could be seized by the state government.
Among those giving evidence that day were Otto Guensche, an SS officer, and Heinz Linge, a valet, who first discovered the corpses of Hitler and his new bride Eva Braun.
On the recording, discovered by researchers for the German Spiegel TV channel, the men speak under oath of entering the Fuehrer’s study after hearing shots ring out on April 30 1945.
“When I entered to my left I saw Hitler on the sofa,” said Linge, who died in 1980.
“Hitler had his head bent forward somewhat and I could see a bullethole approximately the size of a penny on the right side of the temple.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/6973460/Recording-of-Nazi-officers-who-found-Hitlers-body-released.html
May 2nd, 2010 at 4:29 am
Exactly 65 years after Adolf Hitler perished in his Berlin bunker, the man who Moscow claims destroyed his bones today refused to reveal the exact spot in Germany where he ‘cremated’ the Fuhrer.
Vladimir Gumenyuk, a 73 year old retired KGB officer, vowed to take his secret to his grave so that the location in the countryside around Magdeburg would not become the focus of pilgrimages by neo-Nazis.
The veteran is said to be the last man alive from a team of three who were secretly tasked in 1970 by Yuri Andropov – then KGB leader and later head of the Soviet Union – with digging up the bones of Hitler, his mistress Eva Braun along with the remains of Joseph Goebbels and his family.
He told a Russian newspaper that having burned the bones of the Nazi leader and his entourage, he and two colleagues drove the ashes to the top of ‘a cliff on a small unnamed stream’ before they were released to the wind.
It was a pre-determined location decided by Moscow. ‘No-one was there,’ he said. ‘Twenty seconds – and job was done. It was just the last flight of the Fuhrer.’
Gumenyuk’s role was first claimed by Moscow in revelations from the secret services in 2001.
Yesterday he gave a few additional details but said he had turned down large sums from the German media to identify the exact spot he disposed of Hitler.
‘I believe that the coverage of this subject is not appropriate,’ he said.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1270108/Russian-cremated-Adolf-Hitler-refuses-reveal-scattered-ashes.html
June 18th, 2010 at 11:10 am
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August 22nd, 2010 at 5:00 pm
In Nazi propaganda, he was a gallant First World War corporal who frequently risked his life.
Now the myth of Adolf Hitler’s heroism in the trenches has been debunked by research revealing he was little more than a ‘teaboy’ messenger dubbed a ‘rear-area pig’ by frontline soldiers.
No individual has been more scrutinized than Hitler, but detective work by Dr Thomas Weber, lecturer in modern history at Aberdeen University, unearthed new evidence.
Previously unpublished letters from veterans of Hitler’s regiment have challenged the Nazi portrayal which suggested his virulent nationalism was prompted by his experience on the Western Front.
They overturn his image of his unit, the List Regiment, as a band of brothers, intolerant and anti-Jewish with Hitler ‘a hero at its heart’.
They confront long-held views on Hitler’s brave war record, revealing that front soldiers shunned him as a “rear area pig” several kilometres from danger.
The letters and a diary also disclose that List men regarded him as an impractical object of ridicule, joking about his starving in a canned food factory, unable to open a can with a bayonet.
He was viewed by his comrades in regimental HQ as a loner. He was neither popular nor unpopular.
They referred to him as the ‘painter’ or the ‘artist’ and noticed that he did not indulge in their favourite pastimes – letter-writing or drinking – but was often seen with a political book in his hand or painting. He was also particularly submissive to his superiors.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1303804/Adolf-Hitler-loner-rear-area-pig-according-WWI-regiment.html