Most gravestones are a site of solemn remembrance,
where mourners bring flowers and share memories. However, there are some people whose
graves would be more likely to become public graffiti targets - no one
more than Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. But no one’s defacing Hitler’s
grave - because he doesn’t have one. Which raises one big question
- what happened to Hitler’s body? It was 1945, and the walls were closing in on the
Nazi regime. The Soviet Red Army was marching from the east, having liberated Poland. The attempt
by the Nazis to bomb Britain into submission had long since failed, and now the united forces of
Britain, the United States, and the rest of their allies were marching on Germany from the west.
Hitler was surrounded and increasingly paranoid, and had retreated to his bunker, an air raid
shelter in Berlin. As the Soviets approached the city, Hitler discovered that even his own
generals were starting to reject his orders. He was determined not to be taken alive. As Hitler planned to end his life rather
than being taken alive, multiple Nazi leaders jockeyed for position. Hermann Goring
attempted to take control in the aftermath, and was rewarded by being stripped of
his offices by Hitler and arrested. As communications around the city were cut off,
Hitler heard bits and pieces of news about his top allies surrendering - with Heinrich Himmler
even claiming he had the right to negotiate a surrender for the regime. Hitler also heard
word that his closest ally, Benito Mussolini, had been deposed and killed by Italian rebels. It was time for the last rites. Within his bunker, Hitler and his longtime
mistress Eva Braun were married, and then Hitler dictated his last will and testament to
his secretary. Knowing the end was near, he was determined he wouldn’t allow his enemies to get
ahold of him and execute him or put him on trial. He had already obtained capsules of poison from
Himmler before Himmler’s attempted surrender, but now doubted if they would be effective or if they
were just another betrayal. So he gave them to his beloved dog Blondi - and the dog died immediately,
adding one final casualty to Hitler’s long list of kills. He soon said his goodbyes, retreated to
his room with Eva Braun, and prepared for the end. What happened next has been
debated for almost eighty years. The leader of the Soviet Union,
Joseph Stalin, was a ruthless man and he wanted his revenge on Hitler for the
Nazi’s betrayal. He had offered a medal to the person who found Hitler alive as they surged
into Berlin, and Stalin hoped to capture him alive and make an example of him. But it wasn’t to be.
According to witnesses in the bunker, Hitler’s valet entered the chamber and immediately smelled
gunpowder and a strange burnt almond smell. Both Hitler and Braun were dead - Braun apparently
from poisoning, as she had no visible wounds, while Hitler was bleeding from a fresh wound
to his temple and had a gun at his feet. The Nazi leader and his new wife were
apparently serious about not being taken alive. And there was a plan as soon as the news broke. The Nazi leaders knew Hitler’s body
would be of great interest to the Allies, and they didn’t want them to get ahold of it.
Led by the acting Nazi leader, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis on site rolled the bodies up in a rug,
gathered papers covered in petrol, and lit the entire thing on fire. This took place amid heavy
Allied shelling of the area, which shows just how loyal Hitler’s die-hards were - they were willing
to carry out these bizarre funeral rites even as their own lives were endangered. While Hitler’s
body wasn’t totally destroyed by the burning, it was now unrecognizable and was buried in a bomb
crater along with the rug soaked with his blood. And that was the end of the story
- or at least, it should have been. Soon, the Soviets took control of Berlin, and the
news that Hitler was already dead did not make Stalin happy. As word spread of Hitler’s death,
millions of German troops left the battlefield to avoid the Soviet forces. It would be several
days before the Soviets arrived at the compound, and they dug up what is believed to
be Hitler and Braun’s dental remains. A cursory analysis identified Hitler’s
body, which seemed to put things to rest. But Stalin had other ideas. It just seemed too easy, didn’t it? Hitler had
terrorized the continent and beyond for twelve years, and now he’s dead with no way to hold
him accountable for his crimes? That sounds like exactly what he’d want them to think!
Many Soviet operations in the area continued to dig up the bodies of the Nazi leadership,
but it’s not clear if they found any more of Hitler’s body beyond what was believed to be his
teeth. And without more proof, Stalin refused to believe his nemesis was truly gone. And as
Stalin spoke, millions of people listened. And so began the great Hitler conspiracy battle. Early polls showed that over two-thirds
of Americans thought Hitler might still be alive in June 1945, but the leadership didn’t
seem to share those doubts. The same couldn’t be said for the Soviet Union, where Joseph
Stalin actively spread the conspiracies! In fact, only a month after the
discovery of the dental remains, Stalin ordered his Field Marshall Georgy
Zhukov to present details on how Hitler could have survived. And a month after that,
Stalin stated at the Potsdam Conference that Hitler had probably escaped to Spain or
Argentina like so many other Nazi leaders. And this had some unintended consequences. Conspiracy theories don’t stay
where they’re supposed to. Stalin’s motivation for insisting Hitler was alive may have been because he wasn’t willing to
give up on bringing the Nazi leader to justice, but there were also still a lot of loyalists to
Hitler. Soon enough, the former Nazi ambassador to Vichy France, Otto Abetz, was claiming
that Hitler was still alive, just in hiding. Soon, the Allied forces were dealing with a more
active Nazi resistance not willing to give up the war - because after all, if their leader was still
alive, then they hadn’t actually lost the war. It got intense enough that
governments had to get involved. With the Soviets consistently boosting the
conspiracy theory that Hitler was still alive, the British counter-intelligence division in
Berlin launched an investigation. They found no conclusive evidence that Hitler was still
alive - but that didn’t stop the conspiracies. The official report stated that “the desire to
invent legends and fairy tales is greater than the love of truth” - which is probably proven
right every time someone watches an infomercial for a miracle product and picks up the phone
immediately. Even after this investigation, almost half of the US population
still believed the conspiracy. And it was about to get a major boost. It was only a year after the war when letters
started going out around the country from someone calling himself “Furrier No. 1”. The
mysterious madman not only claimed to be Hitler, but insisted he was living in Kentucky under
an assumed name with Eva Braun - and he had not given up the war effort. The “Furrier” claimed
to be building tunnels under Washington DC, and to be armed with sleeper cells and nuclear
bombs - and even invisible spaceships to take the Nazi regime to space. Needless to say, the writer
wasn’t Hitler, he was a miner and Baptist preacher who used his scam to defraud his supporters of
$15,000 before being arrested for mail fraud. But the next conspiracy would
have more meat on the bones. Arthur F. Mackensen wasn’t a bigwig in
the German military during World War II, just a Lieutenant - but he claimed that fate
put him in the most important role of all. In 1948, he spoke to major newspapers and
claimed that on May 5th, 1945 - five days after Hitler’s supposed death - he had fled Berlin
in tanks alongside Nazi official Martin Bormann, Hitler and Eva Braun, who had faked their deaths.
They flew to Denmark, and Hitler and Braun then boarded a submarine to Argentina. The only problem
with this? Not only was there no record of this crazy escape mission, but there was no record
of Arthur F. Mackensen, who may have been named after First World War field marshal August von
Mackensen. So the entire affair may have been a creative work of fiction by some newspaper
writers - who definitely sold papers off it. The question for these conspiracists is, if Hitler survived and escaped, whose body
was dug up in that Berlin bomb crater? For the conspiracy theorists, the answer
is simple - he obviously planned ahead. Hitler was known to be paranoid, and
frequently was surrounded by food tasters, bodyguards, and even body doubles to prevent
him from being assassinated. While it worked, none of them could save him from his fate in
that Berlin bunker - unless they did. The idea is that one of Hitler’s body doubles died in
his place, allowing their body to be burned and then discovered, only for the real Hitler
to escape to a safe space for former Nazis. And the conspiracies would continue for years. During the 1950s, the FBI and CIA constantly
received tips that Hitler was alive - often living in the United States. Maybe that man at the
grocery store had a slightly suspicious mustache. Maybe that traffic cop was a little too
into order when he gave someone that ticket. All these tips were taken by the government,
briefly investigated - and quickly dumped in the circular storage file. But that didn’t
stop the paranoia - the conspiracy about Hitler still being alive made it all the way
to the Nuremberg trial, where one judge briefly examined the evidence. But in 1956, the West
German judicial system issued a final report stating that the circumstances of Hitler’s death
were exactly what everyone thought they were. And that should put an end
to the conspiracies…right? While the Allies were mostly united on the fact
that Hitler was dead, the Soviets had a different opinion. The question is, why? Stalin likely
saw the exact same evidence everyone else did, but he had an ulterior motive for
keeping the truth muddled. After all, if Hitler was supposedly still alive, he had a
reason to keep a heavier hand on occupied Germany. From the start, he was obstructing investigations
of Hitler’s bunker - only briefly allowing a limited investigation of the site months after
the fact. While they found some evidence of Hitler and Braun’s belongings in the ruins,
they would have no chance to investigate them - and the Soviets quickly barred them
from the grounds again on shady accusations. But behind the scenes, a
different picture was forming. By the end of 1945, Stalin wanted the truth, so
he ordered his intelligence agencies to launch a second investigation. This time, they used
modern science to comb every corner of the bunker and gather evidence pointing to Hitler’s death.
To start, they took blood samples from the sofa and wall where Hitler supposedly died. They
tested the blood type and found it was a match to Hitler’s type-a blood. They dug through the
crater again and found fragments of a skull, which had damage from a bullet wound. It
was pretty strong evidence that Hitler had died in the bunker - just like all
the non-conspiracy theorists knew - but it wouldn’t be enough to put
the issue to rest completely. Because there was one
question still to be answered. Hitler hadn’t survived the end of World War II,
and there was no real evidence he ever had. The conspiracy was the product of a combination of
Soviet disinformation, and Nazi wish fulfillment, combined with the successful escapes of
many lower-profile Nazis like Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele to South America. But while
they weren’t household names, Hitler avoiding detection while the whole world was
looking for him was highly unlikely. But while everyone knew he wasn’t alive,
they still didn’t know exactly where he was. Because Hitler’s body was essentially
disappeared by the Soviets. He died in the bunker, and then his body
was exhumed and examined by the Soviets. At which point, it just disappeared.
The decision to not have any sort of memorial was undoubtedly the correct one -
after all, not only did he not deserve one, but a gravestone would become a rallying
point for Neo-Nazis. But many people wanted more transparency - and they were not going to get
it from the people responsible for investigating Hitler’s death - because they were among the most
feared spy agencies to ever grace the planet. And no, they weren’t the KGB. The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs,
usually referred to as the NKVD, was the internal security spy agency for the Soviets. Similar
to the FBI, it handled domestic affairs while the KGB handled foreign affairs. Unlike the
FBI, it had near-universal authority - and there was usually no appeals process when they
got their hands on you. Not only did they take responsibility for the nation’s regular police
work when they were created in 1917, but they also oversaw the prison and labor camp systems.
While they were eventually disbanded, Joseph Stalin brought them back stronger than ever and
made them the country’s official secret police. They were responsible for the investigation of
Hitler’s death, and for the disposal of his body. And if you had any questions, the NKVD
would answer by sending you to a work camp. Around the same time as the Hitler investigation
was ramping up, the NKVD became the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and Stalin’s brutal
repression of his own country ramped up. The Hitler remains went uncatalogued and became
just another artifact within the Russian State Archives. And much of the archives - which
contained documents from pre-Soviet Russia and the height of the empire -
were sealed up tight until the Soviet Union collapsed in the early
1990s. In the chaos in the aftermath, people had other things on their mind beyond
the remains of the Nazi dictator from the 1940s. But that would change with one big discovery. In 1993, the bone fragments that were used
to identify Hitler and Eva Braun’s remains resurfaced in the archives, and interest
in the case surged once again. Suddenly, everyone was taking a look back at all
the research and theories about the Nazi leader’s death for the last half-century.
The most prominent work of literature about the events was “The Death of Adolf Hitler”,
by Russian journalist Lev Bezymenski. He detailed a supposed Soviet investigation - top secret, of
course - that shed more light on the causes of Hitler’s death. Details included Hitler’s supposed
death by cyanide poisoning, which turned out to be long and painful. The book was dramatic - and
also likely completely false, as no evidence of this secret investigation surfaced, and other
historians criticized it as a work of fiction. But in the 1990s, things would change once again. The archives were now wide open, and as Russia
opened to the world under Boris Yeltsin, the true investigations came to light. What was originally
a dossier would be published in 2005 under the title “The Hitler Book”, and it revealed exactly
what Stalin had wanted to know about Hitler. And it seemed the answer was - everything.
Originally classified and in the archives since the time of Nikita Kruschev, the dossier was
over four hundred pages long. It confirmed that Stalin originally believed that Hitler had escaped
and that the Allies in the west were hiding him. Which raises the question - how do you tell a dictator that he’s completely wrong
without being shipped off to Siberia? The report was put together when
the Soviets had control of Berlin, and took four years before it was presented to
Stalin in 1949. It started as an investigation into Hitler’s death - but there really wasn’t
all that much meat there, and they couldn’t go back to Stalin with a one-page report stating that
Hitler was dead as suspected. So the report turned into an elaborate look into Hitler’s reign
in power from 1933 to 1945, and incorporated hundreds of secret Nazi documents and interviews
with imprisoned Nazi officials in Soviet gulags. So how did Stalin’s personal
report shape the debate? Historians believe the report is one of the most
exhaustive looks into the Nazi political system, as well as into Hitler’s declining mindset as
the war went on. What it is lacking, though, is a lot of political context. That’s because it
was written for an audience of one, and Stalin was one of the harshest literary critics out there.
After all, if he didn’t like what you wrote about him, you were headed to the gulag, not getting a
bad review. So the report was haunted by political inaccuracies, including the deletion of the
pact between Stalin and Hitler early in the war, and the Soviet Union’s own antisemitism. Also,
many of the interviews of Nazi officials were conducted under torture, so any information
they gave has shaky reputability at best. And the one thing it didn’t provide?
Any evidence that Hitler survived. Conspiracy theories persisted even amid more
evidence, and newspapers like the Weekly World News frequently published fictional
stories. Was Hitler living next door to Elvis in Florida? Probably not, but that
would make a good sitcom premise. In fact, it did - an ill-advised British sitcom titled
“Heil Honey, I’m Home” featured an undercover Hitler living in Britain in the years after
the war. To add another wacky wrinkle, his new neighbors were Jewish! Needless
to say, this series did about as well as was to be expected - it became one of the very
few shows to be canceled after a single episode. But the actual truth is much less dramatic. From the start, the people who believed Hitler
was dead relied on some key pieces of evidence. The first was the skull fragment with a bullet
hole, but the most important piece was the jawbone fragment and dental bridges. Hitler’s
personal dentist and his associates who worked on the Nazi leader’s dentistry over the years
were able to examine them and identify them, and all came to the same conclusion
- Hitler and Eva Braun died in that Berlin bunker after taking poison, with Hitler
speeding up the process with a single bullet. But that still left the question
of the rest of the body. While Hitler’s body was burned, it was
burned in open air and wasn’t likely to be largely destroyed in the same way cremated
remains would be. It would be unrecognizable, but still identifiable as human remains. So
it’s likely someone spirited the rest of the remains away - and in 2009, more details emerged.
Russian General Vasily Khristoforov, then the head archivist of the Russian Federal Security Service,
claimed that the body had been in Soviet custody for the entirety of Stalin’s reign and beyond -
until the 1980s, when Yuri Andropov took over. The KGB took the body, burned it to nothing, and
dumped the ashes into a German river. This ensured that no matter what happened, Neo-Nazis would
never have a gathering place for Hitler’s remains. And so closed the mystery for good…right? Wrong. Because there was one last act. Philippe Charlier was quickly gaining a reputation
as one of France’s top forensic experts, gaining renown for studying the remains of
European royals. He worked on the remnants of Kings including Richard Lionheart and Louis
IX, as well as proved several supposed relics of Joan of Arc to be forgeries. So when the chance
emerged to investigate the greatest mystery of the 20th century, he wasn’t turning it down.
And so began the final chapter in the story of Hitler’s body - stretching all the way into 2017,
over seventy years after the Nazi leader died. Was there a hidden secret there that
a forensic genius would discover? Nope! Using modern forensic science, Charlier was able
to do a deeper analysis of the teeth fragment, based on the documents of those who examined them
previously and those who worked on Hitler. In every case, it proved a match and indicated that
Hitler died in 1945 and was buried in that shallow grave outside his bunker. While no further
evidence was found on Eva Braun’s remains, all the conspiracy theories surrounding her center
on her and Hitler escaping together - and so it’s likely that final day at the bunker played out
exactly as the official story claimed decades ago. So that should put all those
conspiracies to rest, right? One would think, but conspiracies
don’t die easily. Any resolution to the theory that Hitler survived
would be out of reach now anyway, as the Nazi leader would be over 130 years old now
and long dead, even if he had managed to escape. While Neo-Nazis still exist around the world, most
of them have long since moved on to other leaders. And the Soviet Union’s desire to control the
narrative around Hitler’s fate collapsed along with that empire in the 1990s. So who would still
have an interest in spreading this conspiracy? The answer might surprise you. Sure, some of the sources were your typical
Nazis who didn’t want to admit their idol had died like a coward in a Berlin bunker, or
Soviet loyalists who didn’t want to admit he had died without seeing justice. But the larger,
more common motivation was simply - it makes for a better story. If Hitler’s story ends in 1945,
there’s nothing more to say but the post-mortem. But by creating the idea that there’s
a whole other chapter to his life, you can create a new narrative - no
matter how fictionalized it might be. And that’s exactly what one TV channel did. The History Channel. Sounds like a pretty
credible name - except that for the TV show “Hunting Hitler”, they made most things up. Their
source was some declassified FBI documents that investigated whether Hitler might have
escaped Berlin - and the answer was no, but that didn’t stop the network from
crafting three seasons and a two-hour special out of the idea. Most of the evidence was
circumstantial, exploring possible escape routes and landing places without revealing any concrete
evidence that he actually had used any of them. But one other factor explains the
persistence of these theories. Most wars, even World Wars, are messy and
a complicated mix of political factors and old grudges. The First World War’s
German leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was a relatively low-key figure in the public
mind. But Hitler was an over-the-top evil leader, equally obsessed with racial purity and
determined to conquer all of Europe. Eventually, even his own military men hated him
and tried to kill him. He was one of the most dramatic villains in the history of
warfare, almost like a real-life supervillain. And what do supervillains do all the time? Survive certain death and return
when the heroes least expect it. For more on the Nazi leader’s last days, check out “Last 24 Hours of Hitler’s
Life”, or watch this video instead.
