According to the main version, Adolf Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, as well as the Goebbels family committed suicide on April 30, 1945 in their Berlin bunker. They all decided to end their life in different ways: by shooting themselves, drinking poison or doing everything together.
Unconvincing suicide
In theory, everything sounds plausible: the outcome of World War II was a foregone conclusion, the fate of its instigators was predetermined. In order not to fall into the hands of the Soviets, which would have recalled to the leader of the Third Reich everything he had done on the Eastern Front, the party elite chose the most gloomy way to say goodbye to life - mass suicide.
Such an act is easy to explain - the Fuehrer had an inexplicable fear that his corpse would be transported all over Moscow and he would posthumously become entertainment, "like a monkey." The leader of the Nazis, allegedly during his lifetime, gave the order to burn his body and the bodies of his "comrades in suicide." Hitler's last will was carried out, the charred bodies - not very diligently, but buried in the ground.
Almost a week later, on May 5, Senior Lieutenant Alexander Panasov found the remains. Naturally, it was impossible to visually determine whether the corpses belonged to the Fuehrer and his associates. However, information about the death of the Fuhrer became known the very next day after his suicide - General Hans Krebs shared this information in negotiations with Marshal Vasily Chuikov.
But for the Soviet government it was fundamentally important to understand that Hitler's body, or rather what was left of him, belonged to him. This is because Stalin was suspicious of the information about the suicide of the German leader - he feared that in exchange for information Hitler would go to a secret peace with his allies and they would help him hide and go into an illegal position.
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Two cases, four graves
To find out whether Hitler really committed suicide, the USSR Ministry of State Security began its investigation - an identification case with the long title "Acts of identification, forensic medical examination of corpses, protocols of interrogation of witnesses", which was conducted in parallel with case No. 300919 - search.
Based on the testimony of the servants, the patrol officer and the entire Reich Chancellery, the investigation concluded that the found corpse was indeed the Fuhrer. But the main evidence was a fragment of a jaw and a piece of skull: they were used to identify Hitler and they also helped to find out how the Nazi leader actually committed suicide - he took poison and then shot himself.
The testimonies received from eyewitnesses, Hitler's dentocard and the testimony of his dentist were enough for the Soviet government to make an unambiguous conclusion that the discovered remains belonged to the Fuhrer. It is known that confirmation of the authenticity of the body was received by May 11 - and Stalin was immediately reported about it.
However, the Soviet leader still continued to deny the fact of the Fuhrer's death - probably, he was not completely sure of the commission's conclusions and wanted to make his Western "friends" puncture by false leads. For example, when US President Harry Truman asked Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 if Hitler was dead, he answered bluntly: "No."
Why it was needed is still a mystery. On the one hand, according to the recollections of Marshal Konstantin Zhukov, Stalin even in personal conversations expressed his suspicions about this, which means that he could really believe that Hitler was alive. Joseph Vissarionovich declared to the allies that Hitler was alive and hiding with Franco in Spain and that it was necessary to undertake a raid after him to the other end of Europe. Perhaps due to this, he wanted to promote the communist ideology as far as possible to the West.
For this purpose, Izvestia even published an article that Hitler and Eva Braun were safe and sound and live in a locked castle in Westphalia. This implied complicity on the part of the British, because Westphalia was in the British zone of occupation.
This is probably why the corpses were kept under guard on the territory of the SMERSH counterintelligence department and transported every time the military were forced to relocate. Initially, in June 1945, the bodies were buried in the area of the city of Bukh, then they were transported to the city of Finov, then to Rathenov. Finally, in February 1946 in the city of Magdeburg, they were buried, as it seemed then, finally.
A remedy against neo-Nazism
Meanwhile, conspiracy theories, according to which the Fuhrer did not actually shoot himself, but simply fled from Germany, which was defeated in the war, continued to multiply. According to one of the versions - to a Nazi camp in Argentina, according to another - to a secret base in Antarctica, or even decided to hide in Brazil.
If anything, most of the legends today basically boil down to the fact that Hitler actually took refuge in South America. But its further history is not clear. According to some sources, he was buried in 1973 in Paraguay - this version was put forward by the Brazilian journalist Marcelo Netto. According to others, the Fuhrer is completely healthy, lives on a fake passport in the name of Hermann Gunterberg and is about to celebrate his 130th birthday.
Such rumors, naturally, could breathe new life into the ideology of Nazism. In addition, in Europe, by the 70s and 80s, the positions of the right-wing and neo-Nazis began to strengthen. And the Soviet authorities, apparently, realized this.
In 1970, it was decided to literally erase the remains of Hitler into dust. This is how the "Archive" plan appeared, approved at the highest level - Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev.
The operation was carried out in several stages. At first, under the guise of excavating a unique library, a tent was erected over the burial in Magdeburg. Under her cover, the bodies of the Fuhrer, his wife and the Goebbels were extracted on April 4, 1970, everything was done in the strictest secrecy, at night. The discovered remains were put into specially prepared boxes, taken to the area of the training fields of the engineer and tank regiments of the group of Soviet troops in Germany and burned, ground into ash, and in the morning of 1970 they were thrown into the Biederitz River.
Everything was destroyed except for two significant parts - a fragment of a jaw and a fragment of a skull with a bullet hole. It was decided to keep them as substantial evidence. Now the teeth are under the supervision of the Federal Security Service, the head bone is in the State Archives.
The truth is different for everyone
There are many who doubt the veracity of the Russian version - and today, from the point of view of the FSB, the belonging of the partially preserved remains to Hitler is proven - there are many. The department regularly receives requests for the study of the jaws, while they especially insist on conducting a DNA test, which has not yet been done.
But scientists are convinced that genetic testing will yield nothing. And the last complete scientific analysis of the remains, carried out by French scientists, leaves no room for doubt. The results of the study were published in May 2018 in the European Journal of Internal Medicine.
In order to establish the affiliation of the jaw and bone, scientists carried out their morphological examination, examination with an electron microscope and elemental analysis. As a result, it was established that the remains were completely similar to the X-rays taken by Hitler's doctors a year before his death and autopsy data.
At the same time, even the most complete study of the remains of the Fuhrer will certainly not be able to stop speculation about his death. So the question of what happened to Hitler's remains will probably be asked more than once.
Ivan Roschepiy