What happened to Hitler?

If history is written by the victors, what happens when the winners disagree about the facts?
The death of Hitler, just over 60 years ago, is a perfect case. We all know he took cyanide and shot himself and that his body was then burned outside the Berlin Bunker… I certainly thought I knew it when, a few years ago, I started research for a novel about the last days in the Bunker, based on captured records I had turned up in Washington.
Only then did I discover that our Soviet allies, who were first into Berlin, had denied the story from the start. Our American allies said there was no evidence to support the suicide-cremation story. Only the British, in the person of history don Hugh Trevor-Roper (later of “Hitler Diary” fame), said it was what happened. His official report as a major in the Intelligence Corps would become a best-seller, even though, before putting pen to paper, he publicly acknowledged that “the Soviet authorities are inclined towards the view that Hitler is still alive.”
The first report of the death, by Grand-Admiral Karl Doenitz, the Deputy Fuhrer, was broadcast on May 1, 1945, and had him “fighting against Bolshevism to his last breath”, then “falling, for Germany”. That was the story carried by the world’s newspapers the following day.
Then Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, told his Soviet captors about the Fuhrer’s suicide pact with his new bride, Eva Braun, adding that he had poured more than 200 litres of petrol over the bodies and set fire to them by throwing lighted spills of paper at the corpses. Confusingly, Otto Guensche, Hitler’s SS adjutant, simultaneously claimed that he had set fire to the bodies with a lighted rag and that they had burned “until nothing remained”, then that the ashes – “which crumbled at a touch” – were taken away.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, these conflicting stories hadn’t washed with the Russians. On May 26 Soviet leader Joseph Stalin told US diplomats that “Hitler has escaped and is in hiding in the West.” On June 9 Soviet Marshal Georgi Zhukov said: “We have not identified the body of Hitler. I can say nothing definite about his fate. He could have flown away from Berlin at the very last moment – the state of the runway would have allowed him to do so.” On the same day the (Soviet) Berlin commander said: “We have found several bodies that might be Hitler’s but we cannot state that he is dead. My opinion is that he has gone into hiding and is somewhere in Europe.”
That same month in Paris General Dwight D Eisenhower, the supreme allied commander, told a press conference that he doubted reports that Hitler was dead.
Over lunch with other allied leaders at the Potsdam Conference on July 17 Stalin insisted that Hitler was still alive and “probably living in Spain or South America”.
Meanwhile a growing sheaf of FBI documents was revealing more sightings of the Führer than, four decades later, there would be of Elvis. In August an American lawyer reported that Hitler was in Innsbruck with his personal physician. Similar reports came in from the Swiss Alps, Evian and Grenoble in southeast France, Lake Garda in northern Italy and a ship off the Irish coast.
In September Isvestia reported that Hitler and Eva had “been given sanctuary in the British zone of occupation”. In October 1945 Eisenhower told The Times: “there is now reason to believe that he is alive”. He also said that the Russian allies had assured him they had been unable to unearth any tangible evidence of his death.
Trevor-Roper, however, stuck to his guns. I have to say that he was more than helpful to me in my research into life in the Bunker, but his version of the climax seemed to fall short of being beyond all reasonable doubt. He admitted that he based his account mainly on the “evidence” of people “who had been told about it” by such “eye witnesses” as Guensche and Linge. In any case, the British were hardly a disinterested party: they had connived with the escape of a number of SS men because of their relationship, or even their kinship, with the royal family; and they were being accused by the Soviets of giving asylum to the most inhuman war criminal of the century.
In 1952 Eisenhower, by now US president, stated: “We have been unable to unearth one tangible bit of evidence of Hitler’s death. Many people believe he escaped from Berlin.” Three years later Linge told the News of the World that, although he had not personally witnessed it, he had been told that the bodies had been burned…
In 1969 it transpired that the West Germans hadn’t believed the story either… when police arrested an 80-year-old man they believed to be Adolf Hitler, but who was eventually able to prove that he was (and always had been) called Albert Pankla, a retired miner.
What is true is that in April 2000 the Kremlin displayed a bone fragment they had found near the Bunker in July 1946. It had a bullet hole and was said to be from Hitler’s skull, but they admitted they had no evidence to support this claim. They also displayed photographs, taken from some distance, of a body that, they said, had been buried beneath a Red Army garage in West Germany until 1970, when they had cremated it and scattered the ashes.
We were supposed to be the victors in the conflict, but we still don’t know what is “history”.

Revel Barker’s critically acclaimed first novel, The Hitler Scoop, is based on research, interviews and access to personal records, medical diaries and intelligence archives in Berlin, Washington, Tel Aviv and Ireland.
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The Hitler Scoop, by Revel Barker, is available from amazon.co.uk
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