3 JUNE 1995, Page 38

BOOKS

Where the bodies are buried

Norman Stone

THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER: THE FINAL WORDS FROM RUSSIA'S SECRET ARCHIVES by Ada Petrova and Peter Watson Richard Cohen Books, £17.99, pp. 180 Adolf Hitler did not die in the Bunker, though his newly-wed long-term mistress, Eva Braun, did. A double was substituted for Hitler at the last moment. That double stabbed Eva Braun. Then the senior man-servant, Heinz Linge, came in and shot the double; his, and Eva Braun's, bodies were then taken up to the garden of the Reichskanzlei and semi-cremated. By a trick, the real false teeth of Hitler were included in the package, with the con- nivance of a dentist's assistant called Kaethe Heusermann. Meanwhile, Hitler was smuggled out of the Bunker, and arranged, probably through the Grand Mufti, to reach Franco's Spain. There, funds were kept for him by one Thomsen or Thomson, who had made a fortune out of machinery to assist with the export of oranges to the USA.

This story was apparently sincerely believed by Soviet investigators. Early in May 1945, they had rounded up various people who had witnessed Hitler's last days in the Bunker — his SS adjutant, Otto Guensche, the chief man-servant, Heinz Linge, and Hitler's great friend and chief pilot, Hans Baur. There were several others who had been quite close — Ratten- huber, the security chief of the Chancellery, and Mohnke, whose troops had fought in central Berlin to the end, on 2 May. A few others had escaped: the sec- retaries of Hitler and Martin Bormann managed to pass themselves off as just Berlin housewives in a crowd of others, and the main chauffeur, Erich Kempka, hid up with some Yugoslav prostitutes whom he had been frequenting. They made it to the West, there to be interrogated on the cir- cumstances of Hitler's last days by one Major Trevor-Roper, of British Intelli- gence.

Soviet Intelligence was, however, scratch- ing its many heads: for the story told by their witnesses was quite incredible. For the Russians, Hitler was the great evil genius. And yet here were stiff, conscien- tious German officers telling a tale that appeared to come from a madhouse. Trevor-Roper, with a classical training and a good knowledge of Gibbon, was not par- ticularly taken aback by the lunacies of autocracies on the run. But his Russian counterparts could not believe what they were hearing. What was this extraordinary tale about Hitler's getting married, at mid- night the day before he committed suicide? Eva Braun had apparently flown into Berlin from the safety of the south, deter- mined at last to get her man: what would History think, she nagged, if she went down as mistress rather than wife? According to the pilot, Baur, speaking in his cell to a stool-pigeon, she was even pregnant: in which case it was the great shot-gun wedding of all time. Then, pausing to have her brother-in-law shot for defeatism, Hitler summoned a magistrate to perform the ceremony. He was the Inspector of Rubbish Collection in the Pankow district of the Berlin Gau. The couple, answering routinely as to their Aryan origins, were then solemnly conjoined, with, as witnesses, Martin Bormann and Dr Goebbels (who had performed a similar function for the Hon Diana, Lady Mosley: she found him, she said, 'charming). There followed one of those excruciating south-German social `He seems to have gone direct to the ridiculous, not bothering with the sublime.' occasions, with slimy, open-faced sandwich- es, headache-making white wine, and rubber-faced, polite conversation — which, however, on this occasion turned to methods of suicide. A combination of bullet and poison — appropriately, prussic acid, though the German for that is Blausaure — was thought to do the trick. However, to be certain that the SS had sup- plied a truly effective poison, instead of committing yet another act of treachery, Hitler wished to have it tested. This was done, with the help of a Gruppenfuhrer Dr Stumpfegger, on the dog. Its trainer, who was drunk, went mad, and rushed out to shoot its puppies as well. And then, having dictated his will, reposed a little, had a final, vegetarian and non-smoking lunch, Hitler said good-bye to the ladies, retired, and, with Eva Braun, died.

The bodies were taken up to the garden outside, and received, with more inappro- priateness, an inefficient cremation. The smell from the bodies penetrated the venti- lation-system down below, so Guensche sent a detachment upstairs to bury them. This was done in a shell-hole, which had also been used to bury the dog and a puppy. Then the survivors broke open the contents of the Imperial wine cellars, some fell to dancing, and all, at last, to smoking: for, in Hitler's time, the Bunker had been a strictly no-smoking area. Chief Pilot Baur realised that disaster had fallen when he smelt the tobacco-smoke from the ventila- tion-system.

Such was the story that various witnesses now told the Russians. The bodies were excavated — some bits of skull fell off: they are now in the NKVD archive — and an autopsy was performed; the bodies were identified by the false teeth (which must now be somewhere in the KGB archive, which inherited SMERSH materials). Then, for the next 50 years (and, really, we are not there yet) mystery closed in. The bodies disappeared, and so did the Rus- sians' witnesses. All manner of 'trophy objects' also vanished — notoriously, art- works and a truly fabulous haul of docu- ments on each and every European country, from Louvois's fortifications against the Duke of Marlborough and the original of the Schlieffen Plan to the Proto- cols of the Elders of Zion (signed by Arnold Goodman) and the SOrete Generale's wire-taps of the love affairs of Marlene Dietrich.

Peter Watson, with Ada Petrova -- inci- dentally, facing a law-suit in Moscow because of this — have turned up some of these missing documents, those connected with the Russians' handling of the Bunker business. There is much in their book, and, having been (thank God) scooped by them, I take my hat off. In their catalogue of Moscow Hitleriana, they have missed only one thing: I believe that his library is in the monastery of Sergeyev Posad, once known as `Zagorsk' after some Communist or other. There, it seems, are the original Wagner scores, presented to their Fiihrer by grateful German businessmen upon the occasion of his 50th birthday, on 20 April, 1939.

For some reason, the Russians were just not satisfied with the story that the Bunker witnesses told; it seems, too, that they lost track of the bodies, which were trundled around in munitions-boxes from one head- quarters to another, finally coming to rest in a parking lot in Magdeburg. But were they really the bodies? The autopsy, which was published only in 1967 by one Bezymenski, was defective. It had Hitler poisoned, not shot, and Braun stabbed, not poisoned. It also referred to one ball, and since Hitler had never been examined in that area, who knows whether this was genuine or not? And could badly-burned bodies anyway reveal such things? The Soviet medical men were very senior, and Russian medicine, at its best, is Superb. But Stalin had a short way with dottors, who could be forced to say what he wanted them to say, and in any case the autopsy was performed on 8 May, Victory Night, and I doubt very much if there was anyone in the Red Army who was sober, except maybe for a 20-year-old Jewish interpreter, Yelena Rzhevskaya, who wag given charge of the false teeth in a scent-box with a satin lining and told to make herself scarce.

And then there were the witnesses' tales. Not only were these fabulous, they also contradicted each other. In the Bunker, there is a constant smell; shells explode on and off; the gramophone plays from the Reichskanslei next door; the wounded groan; the wine-cellars are cracked, and the vintages pour down. Who is truly going to remember the exact times and circum- stances of the ineffable surrealities that then occur as far as Hitler's death went? Besides, the Security Chief, Johann Rattenhuber (he had had a nervous break- down after having to have the defeatist brother-in-law shot) told the Russians that the senior man-servant had shot Hitler's corpse, or, at any rate, hinted that that was what had happened.

On the Soviet side, jowls bull-frogged over stiff collars, and piggy eyes slitted in suspicion. These witnesses were having them on. Hitler had escaped. And so another Russian investigation was launched, starting in January 1946. The witnesses were rounded up, tortured in the second degree, confronted with each other, and, as they went through their paces in the Bunker for a reconstruction, filmed. This film exists, and it seems that 'Progress Pub- lishers' have produced a CD/ROM of the whole story (17, Zubovsky Boulevard, Moscow 119847). Some of the story was sold to Der Spiegel, and — though no source is acknowledged — to Dr Hugh Thomas, whose book, Doppelgiingers, strangely asserts a version of the Hitler disappearance that the original NKVD interrogators seem to have believed.

On the second interrogations, the Germans were grilled, in the belief that there had indeed been a plot, and that Hitler had escaped. Curiously enough, the second interrogations were caused by Trevor-Roper. When the British turned over his findings, the NKVD wondered what on earth they should do. Beria him- self was all for an international commis- sion. It was his rival, Abakumov, who objected. Was this because some compli- cated disinformation campaign had been launched, to the effect that Hitler was still alive? Or was it because Abakumov, who was formally responsible for the SMERSH investigation, knew that his team had made a hash of things, and that even the box of bones in the parking-lot might be someone else's? Beria, by launching a second investi- gation, was probably out to discredit Abakumov, who, at the time, had Stalin's ear and was vastly feared. It is, incidentally, here that a real book might be written.

At any rate, the witnesses were tortured, the bones were not re-examined (Abaku- mov refused) and a near-final report was drawn up in June 1946. Nothing was then said to the Allies. Twenty years further on, Bezymenski produced a little book, con- taining the autopsy, and sticking to the story that Hitler took poison. Then noth- ing, for another 25 years. In 1993, Bezy- menski pleaded guilty to Spiegel, and in 1995 revealed that the bones had been blown up in 1970. Meanwhile, in the West, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Alan Bullock and Joachim Fest produced splendid and deservedly best-selling books. There was no Russian response.

An attempt, however, was made, by a Soviet journalist called Parparov, to extract material for a Hitler life-and-death from the SS adjutant and the senior man-ser- vant. They toiled away in a dacha, snooped upon but at least decently fed. They pro- duced a dreary biography, in which the only novelty that I could detect was that Princess Paul of Yugoslavia had been the only visitor to Hitler who was allowed to smoke. The two captives thought that they would be repatriated as the result of their labours, and prepared themselves by jog- ging 15 kilothetres every day in the gar- dens. Jowls and slitted eyes followed these activities, and they were sentenced to 25 years' camp on the grounds that they were preparing to escape. Twenty-five years for jogging is the final touch of surrealism in this whole story — one of some, but not many, that Peter Watson has missed, and I accordingly salute the job that he has done.