Eighty years ago, as Red Army shells rained down over Adolf Hitler’s Reich Chancellery garden, a group of his remaining friends and colleagues huddled under the block-shaped exit of his last grim command centre, the Führerbunker. Flames engulfed the bodies of the newlywed Mr and Mrs Hitler, casting a flickering light over the onlookers, who raised their arms in a final straight-armed salute.
The enduring cultural and political relevance of Hitler’s death hardly needs restating. It gave us online parodies of the rant scene in the film Downfall and, of course, a wild range of conspiracy theories.
I once hoped that my book Hitler’s Death: the Case Against Conspiracy might put an end to those. But four years after publication, when I was invited on to the History Channel to inform viewers that Hitler didn’t die in 1958 from an American nuclear explosion over Antarctica following a battle with alien technology, I found myself wondering why such ridiculous stories endure.
The truth is, there are still fascinating mysteries that surround Hitler’s death, and those mysteries can be partly blamed for the persistence of some conspiracy theories. Remarkably, even 80 years later, historians still can’t say for certain precisely how Hitler died. The main reason for this uncertainty is the messy state of the forensic evidence. Behind that mess lie the Russians.
The first Soviets who entered the Führerbunker on 2 May 1945 didn’t set about a serious forensic investigation. Instead, they pinched a load of Eva’s bras and walked back out with them. This set the tone for the Soviet investigations into Hitler’s suicide.
That afternoon, the Soviet counterintelligence organisation SMERSH (literally meaning ‘death to spies’) commenced their investigation into Hitler’s fate.
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