Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis (Allen Lane History)
Page 173
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 Günsche, given in Berchtesgaden in 1954 (Linge) and 1956 (Günsche), 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 Günsche’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, Günsche, 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 the KGB from a plot of land near a garage in Magdeburg, and burnt. The remains had, it was said, been buried there along with those of Eva Braun, the Goebbels family, and (probably) General Hans Krebs in 1946 and were now to be exhumed because of the danger of discovery through building work on the site. (See ‘Hitlers Höllenfahrt’, Der Spiegel, 14/1995, 170–87, 15/1995, 172–86; also Norman Stone, ‘Hitler, ein Gespenst in den Archiven’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 April 1995; Alexander Lesser, ‘Russians wanted to sell “Hitler skull” story’, Jerusalem Report, 11 March 1993; ‘Kremlin “secretly burned Hitler’s remains”’, Guardian, 4 April 1995; ‘Secret of Hitler’s ashes revealed in Soviet archive’, New York Post, 27 January 2000.) The Soviet evidence was most extensively examined in Petrova and Watson, and was also the subject of a BBC TV documentary, optimistically entitled ‘Hitler’s Death: The Final Report’, in April 1995. Apart from the jawbone, however, the only additional alleged remains of Hitler that have come to light are part of a skull discovered in 1946 (which has never been conclusively identified as Hitler’s). It is unclear how this skull related to the remains purported to have been found in May 1945 and exhumed – presumably headless – in Magdeburg in 1970. If, of course, the Soviets never had Hitler’s body in the first place, the post-Cold War revelations of the disposal of his remains have no standing. Whichever remains they buried in Magdeburg then dug up and burnt, it is unlikely that they were those of Hitler. In any event, the matter is chiefly of relevance to interpretations of Soviet post-war actions rather than to a study of Hitler’s life.
2. Joachimsthaler, 334.
3. Joachimsthaler, 335.
4. Joachimsthaler, 339, 346–7, 349.
5. Joachimsthaler, 356–7; Galante, 162 (Günsche).
6. Joachimsthaler, 274–6; Trevor-Roper, 238–9.
7. Joachimsthaler, 280–81.
8. Joachimsthaler, 277–8.
9. Joachimsthaler, 281 –3.
10. Domarus, 2250 and notes 250, 252; Joachimsthaler, 282–3.
11. Trevor-Roper, 240–41.
12. Joachimsthaler, 284–5; see also 278–80.
13. Trevor-Roper, 241–3; Reuth, Goebbels, 613–14; Irving, Goebbels, 531–3.
14. See Joachimsthaler, 350.
15. Trevor-Roper, 243–7; Lang, Der Sekretdr, 340–50, 436–40. The skeletons were uncovered during work on a building site in 1972. It was possible to identify Bormann and Stumpfegger with almost total certainty through dental records and pathological examination.
16. Müller and Ueberschär, Kriegsende 1945, 101. And see Doenitz, Memoirs, ch.22.
17. DZW, vi.748–58.
18. Müller and Ueberschär, Kriegsende 103.
19. DZW, vi.775–8; Müller and Ueberschär, Kriegsende, 103.
20. Müller and Ueberschär, Kriegsende, 107–8.
21. Müller and Ueberschär, Kriegsende, 178–9 (Dok.19); KTB OKW, vi, 1478–84.
22. KTB OKW, vi, 1482.
23. The signing took place according to western European time at 11.16p.m. on 8 May; according to central European time (German summer time) at 0.16a.m. on 9 May (Domarus, 2252, n.259).
24. KTB OKW, vi, 1485–6; Müller and Ueberschär, Kriegsende, 180–81 (Dok.20).
25. KTB OKW, vi, 1281–2; Müller and Ueberschär, Kriegsende, 181 (Dok.21).
26. Padfield, Himmler, 611.
27. Douglas M. Kelley, 22 Cells in Nuremberg, (1947), New York, 1961, 125–6; Ronald Smelser, Robert Ley. Hitler’s Labor Front Leader, Oxford/New York/Hamburg, 1988, 292–7.
28. Irving, Goring, 504–11; Kelley, 61.
29. Michael R. Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945–46. A Documentary History, Boston New York, 1997, 57–70; 258–61.
30. Marrus, 258–60. For the pyschology behind Speer’s guilt-complex, see especially the aptly entitled book by Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle with the Truth.
31. Wistrich, Wer war wer, 64, 73, 98, 141, 159, 268; Weiß, Biographisches Lexikon, 107, 125, 161, 228, 270, 451.
32. Wistrich, Wer war wer, 177–8; Weiß, Biographisches Lexikon, 304–5.
33. Kershaw, ‘Improvised Genocide’, 78.
34. For the post-war careers of many of those involved in the ‘euthanasia action’, see Ernst Klee, Was sie taten – Was sie wurden. Ärzte, Juristen und andere Beteiligte am Kranken– oder Judenmord, Frankfurt am Main, 1986.
35. For use of the term, see Hans Mommsen, Von Weimar nach Auschwitz. Zur Geschichte Deutschlands in der Weltkriegsepoche, Stuttgart, 1999, 247.
36. Klemperer, ii.766.
37. Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany. The Record of a Visit, London, 1947, 28.
38. Klemperer, ii.790.
39. Manchester Guardian, 2 May 1945.