Charlotte Vosper (17:51)
I think the easiest way to do this is to give you a very rough timeline of some of these key moments. So in June 1945 we get the First Western witnesses who are able to testify to the fact that Hitler's body was burned in the Reich Chancellery Gardens. We have a guard who's on duty outside the bunker who accidentally observes the cremation and he says, I saw Hitler's body. We also have Hitler's former chauffeur, Erich Kempke, who was the person who supplied all the fuel to douse over the bodies and set them alight. And these two men are captured separately by the British and the Americans. They're interrogated separately, and then in late June, they are both paraded before the press. They tell their stories. And this is the first real testimonial evidence that we have from people who are able to say, yes, he's dead, yes, we saw his body destroyed. But that in itself is not quite enough to quell speculation. There's still allegations that perhaps they've concocted this story. All the staff have been briefed to cover up the fact that Hitler has fled the scene and is actually hiding somewhere. So as we move through the year, in autumn 1945, we have a formal inquiry launched by British military intelligence. It's led by the historian Hugh Trevor Roper, and he sets out to try and interview as many bunker witnesses as he can possibly find and establish what did they know? What was Hitler's mood? What were his final movements? And just two months later, on the 1st of November 1945, he gives his press conference in Berlin and he says that he's accumulated all this evidence which proves that Hitler took his own life, that he shot himself in the head. This establishes the enduring thesis of suicide by gunshot. But this isn't necessarily the whole truth by any means. This is what has been unfolding publicly. What I've been trying to do in my book is actually tease out what's been going on behind the scenes. Because now, all these years later, with the privilege of some hindsight and newly released records, we can start to integrate other material and complicate this timeline. And it emerges, for instance, that in May 1945, Shmir, who are one of the Soviet intelligence agencies, do recover the charred remains of a man and woman outside the Fuhrer bunker. They take them to their field headquarters, they perform an autopsy, they have dental remains extracted, and they're like, yes, straight away, those are Hitler's teeth. So the Soviets have this evidence, but the public line is always, no, no, no, no, we haven't found anything. They're not sharing evidence like that at the meetings that they're having with the Western allies. One year later, in May 1946, another arm of the Soviet intelligence, the NK, return to the former bunker site. They're doing their own round of checks. I suppose they've been reinterrogating some of the witnesses that were already in Soviet captivity. But they also revisit the scene. And at that point, in the Reich Chancellery Gardens, in pretty much the same spot where Schmersh had supposedly recovered the corpses a year earlier, the NKVD recover fragments of Bohm skull. One of them seems to have this intriguing bullet hole in it. And so they're convinced this is going to be Hitler's skull and they take that back to Moscow. Again, this evidence is not shared, so we don't publicly know about this yet in the intervening time, we move into the 1950s. By 1955, the last remaining German prisoners of war who've been held in Moscow are being released, returned to the West. And some of these are the most intimate members of Hitler's inner circle. They have been his valet or his close advisors. They have been the people who were instructed to carry out that cremation of his court. So they have handled his body, let alone just see it. And all of a sudden these people are able to testify. And what we have in West Germany at this point is a hearing in Berchtesgaden to establish whether there's enough grounds to declare Hitler legally dead. Obviously, in all the kerfuffle at the end of the war, nobody had ever thought to actually issue a death certificate for him. But now, in the mid-50s, there are various practical reasons why that needs to be done. And the Berchtesgaden hearings then are able to not just re interview witnesses that we'd heard in 1945, but also take advantage of these returning former prisoners of war. And thus we start to hear about the idea that the dental technician Fritz Echmann has been made to identify teeth. And that sort of starts a reaction of, huh, maybe the Soviets did find something again. It's not until a few years later, we get into the 1960s that a Soviet autopsy report is finally published. And it comes out in 1968. It's published in English and German. And it is an interesting book, shall we say. It is very propagandistic in its tone. Much of the pages is a celebratory account of the Soviet war effort. And then Hitler's autopsy report is in this collection. And this book promises to expose all the secrets that have been held up until now. And. And in this report, it clearly acknowledges the fact that they Recovered a body that they did an autopsy. Now they talk about this body having died from cyanide poisoning. They talk about glass splinters in the mouth, they talk about burns to internal organs, all indicative of having ingested cyanide. Soviet narratives then it's not enough for Hitler to die. He couldn't have shot himself like a man, he had to take poison. In their eyes, that's seen as, well, I suppose, stereotypically a woman's weapon. It's seen as weaker. And the response from the west at that point is, nah, this can't be right. This is just pure propaganda. They don't like the fact that obviously it disputes their idea that he shot himself. And they suggest that this is just, again, some sort of Soviet myth making. And the more urgent question at this point as well is, okay, even if this is true, why have you sat on this for all of these years? Why have you never shared it? That in itself, they think is highly suspicious. So nobody really kind of takes it seriously in the West. It's not until we get into the 1990s, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the opening up of Moscow archives, that a renewed interest starts to emerge. We have more documents being released, translated, but also news stories about Soviet archivists suddenly now rediscovering Hitler's dental remains in a box of pens or whatever. It's always in some sort of mundane container, which is kind of interesting, isn't it? You know, he's being stored. And so there's a lot of media interest in the early 90s about his teeth. And then the skull starts to enter the discussion as well. And this continues into the turn of the millennium as we start to get some documentaries and some Western investigators wanted to go and have a look at these items for themselves.