Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

152. Junge, often inaccurate with detail, recollected (IfZ, ED 100, Irving-Sammlung, Traudl Junge Memoirs, Fol.159; Galante, 20) that Eva Braun wore a black dress trimmed with pink roses, one that Hitler especially liked. Linge and Gunsche, two of the first to enter the suicide scene, both mentioned independently that she wore a blue dress with white trimmings. (Amtsgericht Laufen, Verfahren des Amtsgerichts Berchtesgaden zur Todeserklarung bzw. Feststellung der Todeszeit von Adolf Hitler, testimony of Heinz Linge, 8–10 February 1956, Bl.6; testimony of Otto Gunsche, 19–21 June 1956, Bl.5; Joachimsthaler, 230, 232.)

153. Amtsgericht Laufen, Verfahren des Amtsgerichts Berchtesgaden zur Todeserklarung bzw. Feststellung der Todeszeit von Adolf Hitler, testimony of Heinz Linge, Bl.4–5; testimony of Otto Gunsche, 19–21 June 1956, Bl.3–5; testimony of Gertraud Junge, Bl.5; Joachimsthaler, 217–19, 221–2 (Junge, Christian, Jakubeck, Linge, and, especially, Gunsche testimony); PRO, WO208/3791, Fol. 192, Interrogation report on Gerda Christian, 2 April 1946; Michael A. Musmanno Collection, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, interview with Gertraud Junge, 7 February 1948, FF25, Fols.45–8; IfZ, ED 100, Irving-Sammlung, Traudl Junge Memoirs, Fols.158–9; Galante, 20–22 (Junge, Gunsche); Linge, Bis zum Untergang, 284–6 (with inaccuracies, and see Joachimsthaler, 222–4 for Linge’s unreliability as a witness); Gunsche testimony in James P. O’Donnell and Uwe Bahnsen, Die Katakombe. Das Ende in der Reichskanzlei, Stuttgart, 1975, 210 (also in Galante, 21–2); Library of Congress, Washington, Toland Tapes, C–64, interview with Gerda Daranowski Christian, 26 July 1971. Reuth, 608; Trevor-Roper, 230. Kempka, 90, has Eva Braun present at the lunch. He himself was not present; those who were — Traudl Junge and Gerda Daranowski Christian — independently commented on Eva Braun’s absence. Baur, 191–2, and 1955 testimony in Joachimsthaler, 225–6, is unreliable in detail.

154. Amtsgericht Laufen, Verfahren des Amtsgerichts Berchtesgaden zur Todeserklarung bzw. Feststellung der Todeszeit von Adolf Hitler, testimony of Otto Gunsche, Bl.4; Galante, 22 (Gunsche). He had been told to wait ten minutes before entering.

155. Amtsgericht Laufen, Verfahren des Amtsgerichts Berchtesgaden zur Todeserklarung bzw. Feststellung der Todeszeit von Adolf Hitler, testimony of Otto Gunsche, 19–21 June 1956, Bl.5; testimony of Heinz Linge, 8–10 February 1956, Bl.5; Joachimsthaler, 230, 232 (Linge, Gunsche); testimony of Gertraud Junge, 24 February 1954, Bl.5; Michael A. Musmanno Collection, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, interview with Gertraud Junge, 7 February 1948, FF25, Fols.47–8; IfZ, ED 100, Irving-Sammlung, Traudl Junge Memoirs, Fol.159; Galante, 21 (Junge).

156. Amtsgericht Laufen, Verfahren des Amtsgerichts Berchtesgaden zur Todeserklarung bzw. Feststellung der Todeszeit von Adolf Hitler, testimony of Otto Gunsche, 19–21 June 1956, Bl.5–6, 8–9; testimony of Heinz Linge, 8–10 February 1956, Bl.5–8; Joachimsthaler, 230, 232. The meticulous study of the testimony and forensic evidence by Joachimsthaler, 229–73, dispels doubt about the manner of death. The earliest accounts emanating from the bunker were that Hitler had shot himself and Eva Braun had taken poison. Below (who had left before the suicides) heard this as early as 6 May related by one of the guards attached to the bunker (PRO, London, WO2.08/3781, Fol.5, interrogation of Nicolaus von Below, n.d. (but covering letter is of 22 June 1946)). Hugh Trevor-Roper was given the same information by Erich Kempka and Artur Axmann, who saw the bodies in situ, as well as by Martin Bormann’s secretary Else Kruger. (PRO, WO208/3790, Fol.54 (Trevor-Roper’s handwritten note, on a chronology of events during the last days in the bunker).) The key witnesses give no indication that a shot was heard — counter to some of the unreliable stories (e.g. Michael A. Musmanno Collection, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, interview with Gertraud Junge, 7 February 1948, FF25, Fol.48; IfZ, ED 100, Irving-Sammlung, Traudl Junge Memoirs, Fol.159; Galante, 21, testimony of Junge). The intentionally misleading account of Hitler’s death by cyanide poisoning put about by Soviet historians — see, especially, Lev Bezymenski, The Death of Adolf Hitler. Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives, London, 1968, can be dismissed. Equally redundant are the findings of Petrova and Watson, The Death of Hitler. The earliest suggestion that Hitler had poisoned, not shot, himself appears to have come from the reported testimony from around an hour after the shooting by Sergeant Fritz Tornow, who had helped poison Hitler’s alsatian, and said he had detected a similar odour in the room after the suicides (though he had not been in the room before the removal of the bodies) (PRO, London, WO208/3790, Fol.128 (where he is named Tornoff), testimony of Willi Otto Muller, 4 February 1946). Hitler’s pilot, Hans Baur, claimed on release from prison in Moscow in 1949 that Hitler had taken poison, then shot himself through the head. But Baur was not present at the time of the deaths, and his evidence is in any case unreliable in several respects. (See Joachimsthaler, 225, 260.) Artur Axmann, who had seen the bodies, also testified on 16 October 1947 that Hitler had first taken poison and then shot himself through the mouth (PRO, WO208/4475, Fol.39). He repeated this in his interview with Musmanno on 7 January 1948 ((Michael A. Musmanno Collection, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, interview with Artur Axmann, 7 January 1948, FFl, Fols.28–32, 44), saying he had the information from Gunsche, which the latter explicitly denied (Joachimsthaler, 236–7). Axmann’s claim contradicted, moreover, his earlier testimony from 1946 (see below). Neither of the surviving witnesses to the scene immediately following the deaths — Linge and Gunsche — who saw the bodies in situ suggested that Hitler had poisoned himself; and there was no trace of the acrid smell of bitter almonds on his body (in distinction to that of Eva Braun). This negative evidence in itself also rules out the faint possibility that he both took poison and shot himself. The speed at which prussic acid acts would itself render it virtually impossible for Hitler to have crushed the ampoule of poison and then shot; and if the poison could have been swallowed a split-second after the shooting, the spasms incurred would have caused the blood to splatter on the shoulder and immediate surrounds, which did not happen. (On this, see Joachimsthaler, 269–70 and, including a few lines not to be found in the German original, the English version of his book, The Last Days of Hitler. The Legends, the Evidence, the Truth, London, 1996, 179–80.) The forensic evidence also eliminates the story, first put round by Artur Axmann, though based on hearsay evidence without substance, that Hitler shot himself in the mouth. Axmann had in his earliest testimony, in fact, explicitly ruled out a shot through the mouth and claimed (as Gunsche had done) that Hitler had shot himself through the right temple (PRO, WO208/3790, Fol.125 (Axmann Interrogation, 14 January 1946)). Notions that Hitler was given a coup de grace by Linge or Gunsche — a further surmise of Bezymenski — are utterly baseless. The ‘theories’ of Hugh Thomas, Doppelganger: The Truth about the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker, London, 1995 — that Hitler was strangled by Linge, and that the female body burned was not that of Eva Braun, who escaped from the bunker, belong in fairyland.

EPILOGUE

1. This and what follows is based on Joachimsthaler, chs.5–7, the most reliable and detailed examination of the cremation of Hitler and Eva Braun, providing, in addition (347ff.), compelling reasons for utmost scepticism towards the Soviet claims to have recovered the remains of Hitler’s body and to have performed an autopsy on it. (For this, see Bezymenski, Death of Adolf Hitler, and, for an early expression of scepticism, the review of Bezymenski’s book by Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Hole in Hitler’s Head’, Sunday Times, 29 September 1968.) It also rests upon the testimony of Heinz Linge and Otto Gunsche, given in Berchtesgaden in 1954 (Linge) and 1956 (Gunsche), together with several other witnesses to Hitler’s end. I am grateful to Frau A. Regnauer, Director of the Amtsgericht Laufen, for permission to see this material. I would also like to thank Professor Robert Service (St Antony’s College, Oxford) for translating for me part of one of Gunsche’s interrogations in Moscow (Osobyi Arkhiv (= Special Archive), Moscow, 130-0307, Fol.282). Even apart from forensic issues, it is remarkable that, had they possessed Hitler’s remains, the Soviet authorities never indicated this, let alone showed the remains, to Linge, Gunsche, and other witnesses from the bunker whom they held in captivity for up to ten years. Instead, in countless hours of grilling them in highly inhumane fashion, including taking them back to Berlin in 1946 to reconstruct the scene in the bunker — aimed at ascertaining whether Hitler had in fact committed suicide — they continued to insist, despite consistent testimony from independent witnesses to the contrary, that Hitler was still alive. According to Linge (Amtsgericht Laufen, Fol.9), he was repeatedly interrogated about whether Hitler was alive or dead, whether he could have flown out of Berlin, and whether he had been substituted by a ‘double’. When Linge asked his interrogators during the visit to Berlin whether they had Hitler’s corpse in their possession, he was told (Fol. 10) that they had found many corpses but did not know whether Hitler’s was among them. Stalin himself also appears persistently in the immediate post-war years — not just for propaganda purposes — to have disbelieved stories of Hitler’s death. The opening of Soviet archives following the end of the Cold War brought a flurry of new ‘revelations’ about Hitler’s end and the location of his remains, which were allegedly dug up on the orders of Soviet chief Leonid Brezhnev on the night of 4–5 April 1970 by five officers of