It was April 30, 1945, and Berlin,
the capital of Adolf Hitler's tottering Third Reich, was a shattered,
flaming inferno. Tanks and troops of Soviet General Vasily Chuikov's
Eighth Guards army had fought to within a few blocks of the Reich
Chancellery. The end was clearly at hand. Some time after lunch that
day, Hitler and his wife of one day, Eva Braun, retired to their suite
in the Fhrer's underground bunker to take their lives. They left
instructions that their bodies be burned. The war was over seven days later. Yet for two decades, mystery shrouded
the exact circumstances of the dictator's death. In the West it was
surmised, from testimony by Germans who were in the bunker at the
time, that Hitler had shot himself. The Soviets said nothing. In a book
published last week, Lev Bezymenski, a former Red army intelligence
officer, reveals that the Russians not only found Hitler's body after
taking the bunker but that they also performed an exhaustive autopsy.
It showed that Hitler had died by cyanide poisoning, not by a bullet.*In The Death of Adolf Hitler , Author
Bezymenski, now a Soviet journalist, says that on May 4, 1945, a
Soviet private came across two partially burned, badly disfigured
bodies in a shell crater outside the Fhrerbunker. The Russians,
having mistaken another corpse for Hitler's, at first buried the two
bodies, but unearthed them again when a Soviet counterintelligence
officer had second thoughts. On May 8, a team of Russian forensic
experts performed autopsies in a Berlin hospital mortuary. Their full
reports are reproduced verbatim in grisly detail that even notes the
discovery that Hitler had only one testicle. Glass splinters,
apparently from poison ampoules, were found in the mouths of both
bodies. There were no visible gunshot wounds—although part of Hitler's
cranium was missing—and “the marked smell of bitter almonds and the
presence of cyanide compounds in internal organs” led the Soviet
doctors to conclude that the deaths of both Hitler and Eva were caused
by cyanide. A meticulous comparison of Hitler's dental records and the
teeth found on the corpse convinced the Soviets that they had found the
body of the Fhrer. Eva was similarly identified. Stalin showed
“considerable interest in the fate of Hitler,” Bezymenski observes with
seemingly unconscious irony. Yet the Soviets kept their findings
secret. The Kremlin wanted to hold the autopsy reports back, the author
claims, “in case someone might try to slip into the role of 'the
Fhrer saved by a miracle,' ” and to continue the investigation in
order to rule out all possibility of error. Clearly, neither reason
matters any longer—as proved by the fact that Bezymenski was allowed
to publish his book. * A similar, although not as well documented account of
Hitler's death appeared in the Soviet magazine Znamya in 1965.
