The Coroner Series

by Thomas T. Noguchi

  Hitler’s dentist, Dr. Hugo Blashke, had fled, but an assistant, Kathe Heusemann, was found still in Berlin. She was taken to Blashke’s clinic, where she was able to locate a card which proved to be the dental history of Adolf Hitler. But there were no X rays. Again with Heusemann’s assistance, they were discovered in Blashke’s office in the basement of the Chancellery.

  Another of Blashke’s dental assistants, Fritz Echtmann, was found and interrogated. Shown Hitler’s bridge and lower jaw, which the Russians had placed unceremoniously in a cigar box, both Heusemann and Echtmann identified them “unequivocally” as Hitler’s. Furthermore, a gold bridge taken from the mouth of the female corpse was identified “without hesitancy” as belonging to Eva Braun.

  The Soviet book should have settled the question of Hitler’s death once and for all, but it did nothing of the kind. There were too many inconsistencies in it—and in the official autopsy reports included in its pages. For example, Bezymenski said that the X rays of Hitler’s teeth, the most vital tool of identification, were found by the Soviets—but intriguingly the X rays were not published in the book, only pictures of the teeth found on the unidentified corpse.

  There was another forensic flaw in the book. The autopsy reports revealed that the corpse contained only one testicle—and none of Hitler’s medical records showed him to be a victim of monorchism, as the condition is called. In fact, his doctors vehemently denied it.

  Chief among those claiming the book was a fraud was Dr. Erwin Giesing, the last physician to give Adolf Hitler a complete physical examination, after the bomb plot which almost took his life. Giesing denounced the Soviet odontology of Hitler’s teeth, and had evidence to back him: an X ray of Hitler’s head, including the teeth, taken by himself during his examination of the Führer. There were marked differences between this X ray and Hitler’s teeth as they were pictured and described by the Soviets.

  In sum, according to Giesing, the corpse with one testicle instead of two, and the wrong teeth, was not and could not be Adolf Hitler’s. The Soviets had autopsied the wrong man. Had they autopsied a double? Had they been the victims of a hoax? Or were they perpetuating a hoax themselves?

  5

  In this climate of confusion, a distinguished American odontologist entered the picture, and apparently settled the question.

  Raeder Sognaaes, a professor of anatomy and oral biology at the University of California at Los Angeles, embarked on a personal academic expedition to solve the case. He delivered the results of his research at an international forensic convention in 1972. Noting that neither Trevor-Roper’s nor Bezymenski’s book had contained any X-ray documentation, Sognaaes said he had realized that his first task was to find such X rays.

  Sognaaes was apparently unaware of the X-ray photograph owned by Giesing and published that same year, 1972. Or perhaps he thought Giesing’s X rays were not adequate. In any case, his search for X rays led him first to the transcripts of the interrogation of Dr. Hugo Blashke, Hitler’s dentist, by the Americans after the war. In it, Blashke described Hitler’s teeth from memory, and mentioned X rays of Hitler’s head. But he told his American interrogators that his files, including X rays, had been placed on a transport plane bound for Salzburg, which crashed and burned.

  Sognaaes did not give up hope. His search led him to a U.S. archives building in Suitland, Maryland, where he looked up the file of Hitler’s “Dr. Feelgood,” Dr. Theodore Morell. In the table of contents were listed “Annex II: Five X-Rays of Hitler’s Head.” But Annex II was missing. “However,” Sognaaes reported, “separate from the document itself was found a very worn and torn rough pink wartime paper envelope. This, at long last, did indeed reveal the missing links, five X-ray plates marked September 19, 1944, and October 21, 1944, respectively.”

  Sognaaes now felt he had the forensic evidence he needed. He could compare these antemortem X rays with the Soviet postmortem pictures and autopsy description of Hitler’s teeth, and arrive at either an identification of Hitler or proof that the Soviets were wrong.

  Sognaaes concluded, from his study of Blashke’s interrogation, the X rays he found in Maryland and the Russian postmortem information, that “the accumulated evidence now provides definite odontological proof that Hitler did in fact die, and that the Russians did indeed recover and autopsy the right body.”

  This impressive, and important, research of a professional forensic odontologist was greeted by the world press as the final answer to the mystery. Only Dr. Giesing in Germany still objected, and with some good reason, it would seem. He had an X ray of his own of Hitler’s head which did not correspond to the Soviet pictures and descriptions. But Giesing was an eye, ear, nose and throat specialist, not an odontologist skilled in forensic dentistry, and thus his opinions were discounted.

  But the puzzle of Hitler’s fate was far from solved.

  6

  One phase of the continuing mystery began with Sognaaes himself. Almost incredibly, it seems to me, he claimed in 1981 that although the male body found in the trench was Adolf Hitler’s, the female body found with him was not Eva Braun’s. How could that be?

  Sognaaes pointed out that one of the pieces of evidence by which Eva was positively identified by the Soviets was a certain dental bridge with white plastic teeth. According to their autopsy report: “On the metal plate of the bridge the first and second artificial white molars are attached in front; their appearance is almost indistinguishable from natural teeth.”

  If this bridge had actually been in Eva’s mouth, Sognaaes said, the plastic teeth would have melted, along with the metal plate. However, the bridge was not in her mouth. It had never been fitted and was still in the files of Blashke’s office when Eva supposedly died. Thus, Sognaaes believed it likely that the body found in the Chancellery garden was a substitute, not Eva Braun’s, and that the Soviets placed the bridge on the body after it had been found.

  With that revelation, the mystery deepened. For if the body found in the trench was not Eva Braun, why should the man found lying beside her be Adolf Hitler? If we are to believe the Nazi witnesses who huddled in a doorway and watched the flames, the two of them, Hitler and Braun, died together.

  Wondering if the mystery would ever be solved, I was intrigued when I heard that Dr. Lester Luntz, professor of oral diagnosis at the University of Connecticut Dental School, was going to deliver a paper on the identification of Hitler’s body at the 1984 triennial meeting of the International Association of Forensic Sciences in Oxford, England. Luntz had spent eighteen years on his research, and advance word said that he was going to refute both the Soviet report and the Sognaaes report.

  In his speech at the conference, Luntz said that the Soviets, contrary to Bezymenski’s book, had not found Hitler’s dental X rays in Blashke’s office in the Chancellery. Those X rays had indeed disappeared on a plane which never reached its destination. And, on the other hand, the X rays found by Sognaaes in the U.S. archives, and said by him to be definite proof of Hitler’s identification, were not that at all. For one thing, Luntz said, the dates handwritten in ink show a strange and troubling discrepancy. On the alleged German X rays, “Oct.” appears, short for “October.” But if the X rays really were German, the abbreviation would have been “Okt.,” short for the German “Oktober.”

  “Such questionable evidence is unacceptable for making a positive dental identification,” Luntz concluded, adding that in the archives there appeared to have been several sets of original and duplicate X rays. So no one, including Sognaaes, could be certain that the strange envelope he found contained Hitler’s X rays or someone else’s.

  In fact, Luntz believed that the Soviets had autopsied the wrong body, and cited other evidence such as the testimony of Otto Gunsche, Hitler’s adjutant, who had told him that the Russians had not found Hitler’s body. Gunsche, who was present during those last days in the bunker, should know, Luntz said.

  Later that afternoon, in the charming lounge of a small hotel in Oxford, I spoke to L
ester Luntz. Usually a lively, loquacious man, Luntz was subdued. For the very day he delivered his paper refuting Sognaaes, the California odontologist died of cancer. This was sad news for Luntz (and for me, as well); like all professionals, he never let an academic dispute darken a friendship.

  Luntz told me he was writing a book on his eighteen-year search for the answers to the mystery of Hitler’s death, and that the paper he had just delivered merely touched on a few points. He had interviewed many German witnesses and had seen all the documentation, but the only hint he would give me about his new material was: “Sognaaes didn’t know that Blashke was a fanatical Nazi.”

  What the fanatical Nazism of Hitler’s dentist meant in terms of the mystery Luntz wouldn’t tell me, but he emphasized again that the Soviets had not autopsied Hitler’s body.

  In sum, Luntz believes, as do many others, that the Soviets did not find the body of the real Hitler. And Sognaaes before his death claimed that the body identified as Eva Braun’s was most likely a substitute.

  If one substitute, why not two?

  Which brings us back to the days of May 1945 in wartorn Berlin when Soviet investigators told a newsmagazine reporter of a hidden door which led to an underground tunnel, and a note found in it which was apparently left by Eva Braun.

  Could it be?

  WHO WAS JACK THE RIPPER?

  On November 10, 1888, American newspapers published a cable dispatch from London, England, which evoked the terror of the English people in that Victorian era, and created the legend of a criminal whose exploits are still spoken of with dread.

  The Whitechapel fiend has committed another butchery more horrible than any that has preceded it…. at ten o’clock this morning…. three horrified policemen who had first looked in through Mary Jane Kelly’s window, and then drank big glasses of brandy to steady themselves, were breaking in her door with a pick-axe. The Whitechapel murderer had done his work with more thoroughness than ever before. The miserable woman’s body was literally scattered all over the room…. The butchery was so frightful that more than an hour was spent by the doctors in endeavoring to reconstruct the woman’s body from the pieces so as to place it in a coffin and have it photographed.

  Mary Jane Kelly was the fifth and last victim of the Whitechapel fiend, known to history as Jack the Ripper. His victims were all prostitutes, most of whom were found with their throats slashed and their internal organs cut out and either strewn around or taken away by the murderer. Mary Jane Kelly’s heart, for example, was neatly placed next to her face, her amputated breasts were on a table, and her intestines were draped across a mirror.

  The murders brought into the action a most unusual forensic-scientist/detective: Queen Victoria. In a letter to the Home Secretary, she wrote, “The murderer’s clothes must be saturated with blood and must be kept somewhere. Have the cattleboats and passenger boats been examined? Has any investigation been made as to the number of single men occupying rooms to themselves?…. is there sufficient surveillance at night?”

  Royal outrage matched the horror in the street, a terror accentuated by taunting letters from the Ripper in which he informed the police that he meant to keep on killing, and nothing could stop him. In a letter to the magistrate at Thames Police Court, he wrote:

  DEAR BOSS,

  It is no use for you to look for me in London because I’m not there. Don’t trouble yourself about me until I return, which will not be very long. I like the work too well to leave it alone. Oh, it was a jolly job, the last one. I had plenty of time to do it properly in. Ha, ha, ha! The next lot I mean to do with a vengeance, cut off their head and arms…. So goodbye, dear Boss, till I return.

  Yours,

  JACK THE RIPPER

  The killings began on August 31, 1888. Mary Ann Nicholls, a forty-two-year-old prostitute, had been seen lurking around the streets of the East End, drunk, trying to raise fourpence for a bed in a lodging-house. She was later found in an alley, her throat slit and her internal organs disemboweled. In reporting the murder, The Star, a London newspaper, did not spare its readers the gory details:

  The knife, which must have been a large and sharp one, was jabbed into…. the lower part of the abdomen and then drawn upwards, not once but twice. The first cut veered to the right, slitting up the groin, and passing over the left hip, but the second cut went straight upward, along the centre of the body, and reaching to the breastbone. Such horrible work could only be the deed of a maniac!

  Nicholls’ case was mishandled from the start. A doctor called to the scene merely affirmed that she was dead and later admitted he had not seen, or realized, the extent and nature of her injuries. He ordered her moved to a workhouse mortuary, where the attendant, a “pauper” with no medical knowledge, cleaned and washed the body before physicians could examine it for forensic clues. Meanwhile the bloodstains in the street were washed off by police before the Chief Inspector of Scotland Yard arrived.

  Nevertheless, some clues were found. The policemen testified that there was only a small amount of blood in the street, a puzzling phenomenon considering the many terrible knife cuts. Could the victim have been killed elsewhere and dumped there? police wondered. No, because there had been no trail of blood which would indicate that the body had been dragged to the spot, and no marks of wheels in the road. Also a doctor who examined the body stated, “There was very little blood around the neck, and there were no marks of any struggle.”

  The doctor also made these forensic points: The knife slashes were made “from left to right and might have been done by a left-handed person.” The weapon, he said, was a very long-bladed knife, adding that it was possibly a “cork-cutter’s or shoemaker’s knife.” And he remarked that the mutilations were “deftly and fairly skillfully performed.”

  The second murder provided more clues. Eight days after Nicholls’ killing, on September 8, 1888, Anne Chapman, another prostitute, with the picturesque nickname “Dark Annie,” was found on a street in the same neighborhood, even more horribly butchered than the previous victim.

  Once again there was the curious phenomenon of only a little blood found at the scene, and no evidence that the body had been dumped there. But this time the killer had deliberately left clues. A few pennies, two farthings, and two brass rings taken from the victim’s fingers were placed neatly at her feet. A portion of a bloodstained envelope bearing the name of the Sussex Regiment and postmarked “London, 28 August, 1888” was also found, but the address was missing.

  Surprisingly, the victim’s clothes were not torn, but another garment caught the police inspector’s attention: a leather apron hanging nearby. It was saturated with water, but revealed no bloodstains. Butchers and slaughterhouse workers wore leather aprons, and indeed a slaughterhouse was in the vicinity.

  Once again the physician who conducted the postmortem examination complained about what had been done to the body before his arrival. Dr. Bagster Phillips revealed that the body had not even been taken to a mortuary; instead it was carried to a shed and cleaned and washed before he could examine it.

  Nevertheless he detected some differences between the two killings. Nicholls’ throat had been slashed; Chapman’s had been cut clear through, the head almost severed. And, most grimly, the second victim’s kidney and ovaries had been removed. The killer had taken them with him.

  Dr. Phillips said that the cutting out of the internal organs revealed “indications of anatomical knowledge.” He added that the wounds indicated “a very sharp knife with a thin, narrow blade…. six to eight inches in length” or even longer. He speculated that the weapon was either a physician’s surgical instrument or a bayonet.

  As yet there had been no eyewitness sightings of any men with the two victims, but, based on the forensic evidence of the knife and the leather apron, police concentrated their search on the slaughterhouse and butcher shops in the area. Suspects were turned up, but all had alibis. Meanwhile, at an inquest Dr. Phillips emphasized the “deliberate…. and apparently scienti
fic manner in which the poor woman was mutilated…. I myself could not have performed such surgery, even working at top speed, under a quarter of an hour…. No unskilled person could have done this. It must have been someone used to the postmortem room.”

  On September 30, just three weeks later, the famous “double event” occurred: two murders within an hour. The killer was obviously interrupted before he could mutilate Elizabeth Stride, although he did slash her throat. An hour later he found and killed another victim, Katherine Eddowes, and this time proceeded with his characteristic disembowelling and mutilation.

  Not far away from the scene of the second crime, police found bloodstained water in a sink in a narrow passage off the street. The killer had obviously stopped to wash his hands. But, even more importantly, the Ripper had taken a piece of Eddowes’ apron to wipe his hands, and this bloodstained fabric was found in the doorway of a nearby house. And there the Ripper left a message which haunts the killings to this day. On the wall inside the doorway the following words were found written in chalk: “THE JUWES ARE NOT THE MEN TO BE BLAMED FOR NOTHING.”

  “Juwes?” Was that a misspelling for “Jews?” If so, did it mean the Ripper was Jewish, or that he wanted to mislead the police into believing so? Whatever his motive, the writing of the message itself, including the possible identification of the chalk and analysis of the printing style, was destroyed by none other than Sir Charles Warren, the bumbling Police Commissioner. He ordered the message to be wiped off the wall immediately.

  In the words of a junior officer at Scotland Yard, “The metropolitan police held the clue to the identification of the murderer in their own hands and deliberately threw it away under the personal direction of the Commissioner of Police, who acted in the belief that an anti-Semitic riot might take place.”