Hunting Hitler
Page 5
In 1947, Trevor-Roper published the results of his investigation in The Last Days of Hitler,44 a short book that received international acclaim and established for decades the “authoritative” account of Hitler’s death.
Trevor-Roper’s account of Hitler’s demise
Trevor-Roper begins by relating an account of how Hitler reacted to Mussolini’s death.
Captured by partisans during the general uprising of northern Italy, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci had been executed, and their bodies suspended by the feet in the marketplace of Milan to be beaten and pelted by the vindictive crowd. If the full details were ever known to them, Hitler and Eva Braun could only have repeated the orders they had already been given; their bodies were to be destroyed “so that nothing remains”; “I will not fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle to divert his hysterical masses.”45
With this passage, Trevor-Roper introduced the idea that Hitler preferred to kill himself rather than end up becoming a spectacle like Mussolini had become after his death. But notice how cleverly he has written this passage. Truthfully, he had no evidence that Hitler knew anything about how Mussolini and Clara Petacci died. The key phrase in the passage above is this: “If the full details were ever known to them …” What this signaled is that Trevor-Roper knew upon entering into the discussion of Hitler’s death that he was speculating, providing a fictional account. Obviously, Trevor-Roper did this only because he did not have the evidence to prove what Hitler was thinking in what Trevor-Roper wanted the reader to conclude were his final hours.
In the next few pages, Trevor-Roper described how Hitler had Professor Haase, his surgeon, put down his favorite Alsatian dog, Blondi. Hitler had the occupants of the bunker line up so he could shake hands with them and bid a final solemn goodbye. “He [Hitler] walked in silence down the passage and shook hands with all the women in turn,” Trevor-Roper wrote, describing the Führer as appearing drugged.46 Trevor-Roper wrote that all the participants in this strange drama knew it could only mean one thing: “The terrible sorcerer, the tyrant who had charged their days with intolerable melodrama tension, would soon be gone, and for a brief twilight they could play.”47 The play involved the occupants of the bunker breaking out into a brief dancing episode. Again, notice how Trevor-Roper used this detail to build the tension by demonstrating how those sharing the bunker with Hitler knew the end was near for the tyrant. Trevor-Roper’s writing building up to Hitler’s dual suicide with Eva Braun was emotion-laden, subtly drawing the reader into the presumption that Hitler had to have committed suicide, otherwise the events he was describing made no sense.
Trevor-Roper’s narrative picked up the next morning, April 30, 1945, with Hitler’s bodyguard and adjutant Sturmbannfuehrer Otto Guensche ordering Hitler’s chauffeur Strumbannfuehrer Erich Kempka to go fetch 200 gallons of petrol, lying that the fuel was needed for a ventilating plant that was oil-driven. Obviously, the petrol would not have been needed if there weren’t bodies to cremate. Next, Trevor-Roper has Hitler and Eva Braun hold a “farewell ceremony” with the top officials yet remaining in the bunker, including Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann and his Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Following this, Hitler and Eva Braun return to their private suite. Then comes the climactic passage:
The others were dismissed, all but the high priests and those few others whose services would be necessary. They waited in the passage. A single shot was heard. After an interval they entered the suite. Hitler was lying on the sofa, which was soaked with blood. He had shot himself through the mouth. Eva Braun was also on the sofa, also dead. A revolver was by her side, but she had not used it; she had swallowed poison. The time was half-past three.48
Again, the account of Hitler’s suicide is skillfully written to hide what Trevor-Roper truthfully does not know. Notice, Trevor-Roper omitted stating exactly who went into the suite to discover the dead bodies, and who waited outside. Next, Trevor-Roper described that Arthur Axmann, the head of the Hitler Youth, arrived in the bunker and was allowed to view the bodies. Trevor-Roper has Axmann and Goebbels exchange a few words before Goebbels departs, leaving Axmann alone in the suite with the bodies.
Outside the bunker, we are told Hitler’s minions were preparing what Trevor-Roper described as “another ceremony,” namely, “the Viking funeral.”49 Inside the bunker, Guensche told Kempka, “The Chief is dead,” while Hitler’s adjutant, Heinz Linge, wrapped Hitler’s body in a blanket to conceal “the bloodstained and shattered head.” Trevor-Roper was careful to add a detail that “other observers” supposedly recognized that the body had to be Hitler’s because they easily recognized Hitler’s familiar black trousers.
Trevor-Roper next had two S.S. officers carry Hitler’s body up the four flights of stairs to the emergency exit and out into the garden. After this, Trevor-Roper had Bormann enter Hitler’s private room to take up Eva Braun’s body. “Her death had been tidier, and no blanket was needed to conceal the evidence of it,” Trevor-Roper wrote, making it clear that those in the bunker who saw the female body before it was cremated recognized the body as Eva Braun’s. Trevor-Roper noted that Bormann took Eva Braun’s body to the foot of the stairs, where it was handed to Guensche, with Guensche handing the body in turn to a third unidentified S.S. officer who carried Eva Braun’s body upstairs to the garden.50
So, now that the two main characters have been eliminated by suicide, with Trevor-Roper taking pains to identify witnesses who could identify the bodies, all that remained for him to do was to describe how identifiable witnesses knew the bodies that were cremated beyond recognition were Hitler and Eva Braun. To accomplish this, Trevor-Roper conveniently added to the narrative two uninvited witnesses outside who both supposedly recognized Hitler and Eva Braun before the bodies were cremated.
Outside the bunker, police guard Erich Mansfield, on duty in the concrete observation tower at the corner of the bunker, decided to investigate. Before scurrying back to his tower, Mansfield watched the funeral procession emerge from the bunker, according to Trevor-Roper’s account. “First there were two S.S. officers carrying a body wrapped in a blanket, with black-trousered legs protruding from it,” Trevor-Roper wrote, describing the scene now supposedly through Mansfield’s eyes. “Then there was another S.S. officer carrying the unmistakable corpse of Eva Braun.”51 Trailing out of the bunker last were the mourners, including Bormann, Goebbels, Guensche, Linge, Kempka, and Wehrmacht general Wilhelm Burgdorf, one of the last remaining military generals loyal to Hitler. Trevor-Roper wrote that the corpses became enveloped in a sheet of flame, while the mourners came to attention and gave the Hitler salute before they slipped back in to the safety of the bunker to escape the Russian bombardment.
Next, the two corpses were supposedly placed side-by-side and petrol was poured over them. Guensche dipped a rag in petrol, set it alight, and threw it out on the corpses. Police guard Hermann Karnau, the second uninvited spectator, came accidentally on to the scene as the cremation was in progress. “Karnau watched the burning corpses for a moment,” Trevor-Roper related. “They were easily recognizable, though Hitler’s head was smashed. The sight, he says, was ‘repulsive in the extreme.’” The corpses, according to Trevor-Roper’s account, burned for hours until a Russian artillery shell scored a direct hit, creating a crater that conveniently became the grave for whatever remained of the bodies.
Trevor-Roper concluded the narrative with the following observation:
That is all that is known about the disposal of the remnants of Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s bodies. Linge afterwards told one of the secretaries that they had been burned, as Hitler had ordered, “’till nothing remained”; but it is doubtful whether such total combustion would have taken place. One hundred and eighty litres of petrol, burning slowly on a sandy bed, would char the flesh and dissipate the moisture of the bodies, leaving only an unrecognizable and fragile remainder; but the bones would withstand the heat. These bones have never been found.52
; Trevor-Roper commented that the Russians “have occasionally dug in that garden,” but many bodies were found there and Trevor-Roper expressed doubt the Russians could possibly have recovered Hitler and Eva Braun’s corpses.53 Trevor-Roper concludes the account lyrically: “Whatever the explanation, Hitler achieved his last ambition. Like Alaric, buried secretly under the river-bed of Busento, the modern destroyer of mankind is now immune from discovery.”54 With that, Trevor-Roper completes the narrative, concluding that Hitler accomplished his goal in that the Russians never discovered his body to expose the corpse to derision and ridicule. Trevor-Roper wrote the account conveniently so that we are convinced because of the witnesses that Hitler was not only dead, but also gone, and there was no way the Russians could have recovered his body.
What the careful reader would note is that by admitting Hitler’s body was not discovered, Trevor-Roper has just admitted there is no physical proof that Hitler died. For all we know, Trevor-Roper’s entire account could have been fictional. This is what Trevor-Roper’s detractors have argued since his book was first published in 1947.
What Trevor-Roper neglects to tell the reader is that the Russians prohibited him from interviewing the witnesses in the bunker that they had taken prisoner. Yet, Trevor-Roper describes the actions of Linge and Kempka as if he was certain what he wrote about their actions was in fact what they did. The Americans, who had orders to cooperate with the British investigation, allowed Trevor-Roper access to the written accounts of American military interviews with the bunker witnesses held prisoner by the Americans.55 BBC journalist Robert Harris, while investigating Trevor-Roper’s role regarding the Hitler Diaries, concluded that he only managed to interview in person seven witnesses who were with Hitler during the final months of his life, including the chauffeur, Erich Kempka, who obtained the gasoline for Hitler’s cremation ceremony, and the guard Hermann Karnau who ended up witnessing the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun being placed in the pit in the Chancellery garden and the cremation ceremony that followed.56
Bormann was nowhere to be found, and Goebbels as well as his wife and children were dead in what amounted to a family suicide. Clearly, if Trevor-Roper had conducted more interviews himself, he could have begun his book with a dramatic and detailed account of Hitler’s death in which he quoted eyewitness testimony word-for-word. This he did not do. Instead, in a book of 254 pages dedicated to the final days of the Führer, Trevor-Roper devoted only 10 pages at the end of the book to delivering an emotionally written story of how Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide together that he must have assumed would be believable, as long as Hitler stayed missing.
Also little questioned when his book was published in 1947 was why Trevor-Roper had changed the account of the suicides from what Newsweek published in the month following Hitler’s presumed death. In Trevor-Roper’s account, Hitler shoots himself in the mouth and Eva Braun takes poison. Yet in Newsweek’s account, Hitler shot himself “through the head” and Eva Braun shot herself through the heart.
Hitler’s suicide: a judge investigates for the United States
In 1950, attorney and jurist Michael Musmanno published Ten Days to Die, an account of Hitler’s last days based on the dozens of interrogations of Hitler associates that he conducted while he lead the US investigation to determine whether Hitler died at the end of World War II.57 Musmanno had served as naval aide to General Mark Clark, Fifth Army, during the US invasion of Italy. After the war, Musmanno served as presiding judge in the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal trials brought in 1947 and 1948 against officers of the Einsatzgruppen—SS mobile death squads that fought behind the front lines in Eastern Europe from 1941 to 1943 and were prosecuted for the mass murder of over one million Jews. Musmanno ended his career as a justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. While he was also denied direct access to interrogate the Hitler associates held prisoner by the Russians, he had much more access to eyewitnesses to Hitler’s last days who were not in Russian captivity. Taking three years to conduct the interviews for his 1950 book from a wide range of Nazis, including prominent Nazis such as Hitler’s successor Admiral Dönitz, Hitler’s secretaries, and of course Erich Kempka. In total, the Gumberg Library Digital Collection at Duquesne University has archived the original typed transcripts of over 65 interviews Musmanno conducted prior to 1950 with Nazi associates of Hitler, including as mentioned several who had participated in-person in Hitler’s last days in the Führerbunker.58
In Musmanno’s account of Hitler’s death, he acknowledged that he did not know precisely why Hitler committed suicide. “He [Hitler] does not want to die,” Musmanno wrote, describing the scene in which Hitler shakes hands to say goodbye to those in the bunker just before the final moments. “If he dies for anything, he dies for fear—fear of the Russians, fear of the disclosure that he is a corporal after all—so he confines his final remarks on the platform of life to directions to the stage manager about what to do with the papier-mâché figure left on his hands after the curtain goes down.”59 Musmanno reported that Hitler had left the final arrangements about disposing of his body to Otto Guensche, his persona adjutant. Interestingly, Guensche was imprisoned by the Soviets on May 2, 1945, and remained in Russian prison and labor camps until he was released in 1956.
But to continue Musmanno’s narrative, Guensche is described as accompanying Hitler and Eva Braun into what Musmanno describes as “their apartment” in the Führerbunker; Hitler nods knowingly to Guensche as he exits, closing the door behind him.60 Standing outside Hitler’s private rooms, Musmanno named the following Hitler associates as waiting: Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann, minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels, Wehrmacht general Hans Krebs, leader of the Hitler Youth Arthur Axmann, and Wehrmacht general Wilhelm Burgdorf. Once they heard the pistol shot, Musmanno reports Axmann, followed by Goebbels, was the first to enter, as Guensche stepped aside. What they found is that Hitler committed suicide by a pistol shot through his mouth after he had bit on a cyanide capsule, and Eva Braun died from having ingested cyanide poison. Trevor-Roper agrees that Hitler shot himself in the head, but he neglects to note that Hitler had also bitten down on the cyanide capsule.
Here is Musmanno’s word-for-word account of what Axmann and Goebbels found inside:
Hitler, sitting on the sofa, arms dangling, has fallen forward on a little table from which his head, mouth agape, is dripping blood onto the rug, which absorbs it like a parched soil which has waited long for water. His pistol (the same Walther 7.65) lies on the floor to his right. His most recent acquisition, Eva Braun, has paid the price that so many have paid who loved him too well. Her mouth is half open, her eyes half shut, and her head inclines on his left shoulder. Her pistol (a Walther 6.35) is also at her feet, unfired. Nevertheless, there is no breath in Eva’s nostrils.61
Musmanno detailed Hitler’s fatal shot graphically: “The blast of the pistol shot’s explosion in his mouth ruptured the veins on either side of his forehead.”62 Given this account, the couch on which Hitler sat and the walls of the bunker would have been splattered with Hitler’s brain matter and blood.
In Musmanno’s account, Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, wraps Hitler’s head and upper body in a blanket and carries him out. Bormann gathers up Eva Braun and hands her over to Kempka. The group climbs the stairs out of the bunker into the garden above. Guensche and Kempka grab the petrol cans Kempka had gathered up earlier in the day, and proceed to douse Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s bodies with gasoline. Musmanno agreed with Trevor-Roper that Russian artillery shells created a grave that covered the two char-burned corpses. “There never was any authoritative account that Hitler’s and Eva Braun’s bodies were ever found,” Musmanno concluded, declaring as a fraud the Russian assertion to the contrary.63 Yet somehow, the Russian army, as we saw in the last chapter, claimed to have both bodies.
Eyewitnesses tell different stories
Lev Bezymenski’s 1968 book, The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from the Soviet Archives, not only
raised questions about the autopsies: The book made it clear that the Führerbunker eyewitnesses who were captured by the Russians were subjected to several years of repetitive, brutal interrogation techniques involving food and sleep deprivation, as well as constant subjugation to freezing jail cells without adequate clothing or bedding to protect against the cold. As a result, the German prisoners appeared to tell their Russian interrogators whatever they perceived the Russians wanted to hear. Bezymenski made it apparent that the eyewitness testimony was essentially worthless by producing a simple chart that compared the two different stories told by Hitler’s bodyguard and adjutant Otto Guensche (one in 1950 and another in 1960), a third story told by Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge, a fourth story told by Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, and a fifth version as reported by author Trevor-Roper.64
Erich Kempka
Trevor-Roper
Position of the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun
On sofa (Hitler lying, Braun sitting)
Lying next to each other on sofa
Entry of shot in Hitler
Mouth
Mouth
“The confusion and lack of uniformity in the statements indicate that the collaborators who managed to escape from the bunker purposely tried to hide the truth in order to foster the legend that the Führer had shot himself like a man,” Bezymenski concluded.65 As we noted in the first chapter, Bezymenski argued that the Germans wanted to portray Hitler’s death in as heroic a manner as possible, while the Russians preferred to portray Hitler as having taken the cowardly way, biting down on a cyanide capsule because he lacked the courage to pull the trigger on himself. Bezymenski does not seriously consider another possibility, namely, that the stories varied because all the eyewitness were fabricating the dual suicide scenario, in an effort to cover up the truth that Hitler and Eva Braun had escaped.