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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Campbell's Soup

I haven't read the Campbell diaries, nor in all probability will I bother, not least because on the evidence of the lifted quotes I have read in the newspapers (on-line) the grammar is so sloppy, the writing so unstructured, that I would find it irritating. True, they are supposed to be extracts from a diary written late at night: but they are "edited", even "sanitised", extracts, edited by Campbell with the assistance of his old boss at the Mirror, Richard Stott. Both of them can write a bit. The least they might have done is clean up the syntax.
If, on the other hand, the fault is down to inadequate retyping, at speed, under pressure to meet the newsprint or agency deadline, heads should roll. Shorthand is long gone out the window, but typing - in a new world devoid of competent (or any kind of) subbing - is nowadays more important than it ever was.
It's fairly common, among our Old Farts' group, to say what would have happened "in our day". Nothing would have happened because even the lousiest copy typists (and on the Mirror we had one who didn't speak any recognisable form of English) were protected unto death by SOGAT. But now there is no such bodyguard system for the inept. Typists who press Send or Submit without reading their own copy or having it checked should be fired.
On the spot. These days it would be allowed. It doesn't happen, because editorial management is also incompetent and idle and, if its internal memos are any clue, similarly grammatically challenged.
As to the much-advertised revelations of the diaries themselves, within an hour of publication the Press Association reported that there was "nothing new" in those 816 pages. Possibly their reporter could reach that conclusion with such impressive speed - though I doubt it.
A day later the Daily Telegraph's Rachel Sylvester [who she? -Ed] writes that "politically, the diaries are not particularly revealing."
Oh really? Rachel and her chums knew all that stuff all the time then, did they?
Then why is everybody going on at such length about the political equivalent of those "Not many dead" stories?
"There was nothing to report from last night's speech," the meeja-trained reporter tells his news editor, "because somebody shot the speaker..."
But what - the chattering political classes kept all that information for cosy discussion in the Press Gallery, perhaps sharing it with their dinner guests at home in Islington without bothering hoi polloi readers with such trivia?
What the extracts that I have read do not reveal (possibly with good reason) is the total idleness of that most pompous group of scribblers - self-inflated far beyond the normal run of Fleet Street hack, or even of typical modern editor - the Parliamentary Lobby Group [their caps].
This is a club more elitist and exclusive than the Lords.
They do not see themselves as other men, which is a pity, not least because their role in life is supposedly to hear what is going on in the corridors of power - the rumour and the innuendo, the shared back-of-the hand confidence - and report and interpret it for the rest of the world, rather than to rely on official statements (those being the province of the foot soldiers, the parliamentary reporters).
But how do they set about this task under a new regime created by Campbell, a man most of them protest to despise?
They troop along to meetings that he calls so that he can brief them. They take notes, although these days - such is the level of "secrecy" and of "confidentiality" (and of Pitmans prowess) within the Lobby - they are also allowed to take tape recorders with them. Then off they go to their lap-tops in pleasant privileged rooms in the Palace of Westminster and file it back to the office. They quote Campbell (occasionally, if they'd been good, he would trot out "TB" as a special treat for them), apply their own... er, spin to the story and that's it. Back to Annie's Bar for a drink with the lads and with the MPs to whom they - out of touch with the reality of the world beyond SW1 - alone suck up.
So you get Campbell's spin (about which they complain), amended by the Lobby man's "expert" and "interpretive" spin. And the public pays through the nose for the sheer joy of being allowed to share it.
In my day (here we go) the Lobby man - he was the Political, rather than the Parliamentary correspondent - was the top job on any newspaper. It went only to an established reporter who already had the contacts in place, who could ferret out stories, could pick up gossip and interpret it as news. And additionally, he could usually write it well.
MPs with something to get off their chests could talk to them individually or in small groups in the certain knowledge that the source would remain confidential. The understanding, on both sides, was that the information was sound, and its basic truth was the only quid pro quo for the guarantee of total confidentiality.
When Joe Haines did the Downing Street job for Harold Wilson, he understandably had his own friends within the Lobby to whom he would drop stories that he wanted to get out. Bernard Ingham, in a similar role for Mrs Thatcher, did much the same. At different times in my childhood I ran up against both of them.
Neither thought twice about calling in commentators through the awesome door of Number Ten for a bollocking if he felt the hacks had let the side down, or strayed from the party plot. Being cut off from this innermost source would be a severe punishment for the wayward reporter.
But the difference was that those two men, even at their most belligerent, respected journalists.
Campbell, having been in the Lobby himself immediately before taking up the job, despised them.
For the plain truth is that - with the possible exception of so-called Crime Reporters who do no more than sit in the press room at Scotland Yard and feed back to the office official statements that have just been "released" to them by the Met's spokesmen - there is no more idle job in Fleet Street than that of a Lobby Correspondent.
Nor, given the fact that these days the Downing Street briefings sometimes appear in full on TV, is there a more useless one.
When I heard that Campbell was accused of "sexing up" the government's position, even on something as important as the threat imposed or implied by Saddam Hussein, I thought: Yes; that is what a press officer is paid to do. He takes the brief and he sexes it up.
Stories, in Fleet Street terms, are either sexy or they are boring. As a general rule, boring fails to make the paper. Derek Jameson once said that news was something with a CFM factor. If you read an article and said Cor, Fuck Me! It was a story. Andrew Marr described the same thing as FMD - Fuck Me Doris.
If nothing else, Campbell's diaries have exposed the system. Exposed it even for those readers and editors who didn't know how it worked.
Will it be reported among the acres of space being devoted to the Diaries?
I suspect not. For newspapers are putting their own censored and censorious spin on what appears in their pages.
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Philip Nicholson remembered

Two years ago today (July 10), my old mate and drinking partner Philip Nicholson died. Here’s the obit, as it appeared in The Independent.

Philip Nicholson used to sit with both elbows on the bar of Gleneagles, his favourite watering hole in Gozo, Malta, and watch with amusement as tourists entered in search of the best-selling author who used the nom de plume A J Quinnell. Often an English or American tourist would put himself forward, sometimes it would be a local Gozitan fisherman; Nicholson himself would keep quiet, although chuckling with joy as the pretenders wrestled to answer intricate and detailed questions from his passionate readers.
Nicholson, born in Nuneaton in 1940 during an air raid and educated mainly at Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, Wakefield, had adopted an alias chiefly as a means of distancing himself from the public in the event that his books became successful. As a teenager spending holidays with his parents in Tanganyika he had met a party of white hunters surrounding his then hero, Ernest Hemingway. When he asked to meet the great man he was rebuffed with the message: “I have no time for fucking kids.” Young Nicholson considered this to be bad form. Already convinced that one day he too would be an author, he decided on the spot that he would never behave in a similar way with his public.
But first he had to earn some money. After school he worked for a shipping company in Liverpool and at 20 became a trader in textiles working out of Hong Kong. It was while there that he met the characters who would form the basis for his thrillers –mercenaries, former members of the French Foreign Legion, journalists and crooks.
Once, on a flight between Tokyo and Hong Kong, a fellow passenger, an Italian, suffered a heart attack. The crew was about to order an ambulance from the General Hospital but Nicholson intervened and told them to contact a private hospital, where he had connections, and where he convinced the stricken man’s associates he would receive better attention. The following day he was visited by a group of Italians who expressed their eternal thanks, and promised him help if ever he needed it.
When he started researching the plot for Man On Fire, a book based on the increasing number of Mafia kidnappings in Italy, he made contact with the man’s family. They were eager to help, and provided introductions to lawyers, to anti-Mafia investigators, and to Mafiosi who were happy to assist and who even asked to be named in the novel. Published in 1981, it became an immediate best-seller. Searching for a nom-de-plume, and looking for an unusual name, he took the surname of Welsh rugby forward Derek Quinnell, and the initials, A J, from the son of his local barman.
In 1987 the book was made into a lack-lustre movie starring Scott Glenn and Joe Pesci with Jade Malle as the young girl kidnap victim. The screenplay went through several transitions under Italian-French direction. At one stage, reading the script, Nicholson mentioned that it did not appear to be following the line of the book. The script-writers replied: “You mean, there’s a book…?”
Nicholson, who had imagined his hero as looking like Robert Mitchum, was unimpressed by the outcome, as was the majority of the cinema-going public.
When Hollywood remade the film last year the director Tony Scott cast Denzel Washington as the hero, and Dakota Fanning as the young victim but he used Mexico as the location because of the inordinately high number of kidnappings in Mexico City. It received high critical acclaim, not least from Nicholson himself who was happy that it used a lot of his original dialogue.
By this time the book had sold more than eight million copies in paperback and had been translated around the world. The most ardent fans emerged in Japan where readers admired the samurai-style dedication of the hero. Although the book notes said only that the author lived “on an island in the Mediterranean”, Gozo figured extensively as the hero’s home base. His local was named as Gleneagles and many of the local fishermen in the bar – many of whom could not read fluently in English – had cheerfully agreed to be featured as characters. The Maltese islands thus received their first influx of Japanese tourists, who came on specially organised literary jaunts in search of the author, and Nicholson (as Quinnell) was invited several times on lecture tours and book signings in Tokyo.
Many of his novels are now out of print and early copies are much sought after and highly prized. Paperback copies of Snap Shot are offered on the Internet at more than £130; Message From Hell at £68, an early edition of Man On Fire at £63.
Nicholson, married to Danish novelist Elsebeth Egholm, was working on what he had already decided would be his last novel, a “prequel” to Man On Fire, when he died at home in Gozo where he had lived since the early seventies.
Revel Barker