April 30, 1945: As Hitler dies, Stalin lies

ON the afternoon of Monday, April 30, 1945 – 80 years ago today – Adolf Hitler and his new wife Eva Braun, whom he had married just 40 hours earlier, went into his apartment in the bunker under the Chancellery in Berlin and sat together on a small sofa. As artillery shells rained down outside and Soviet troops closed in, the 56-year-old Nazi dictator and his 33-year-old bride carried out their suicide pact. Hitler shot himself in the head with his pistol while Braun bit on a cyanide capsule.

The death of the man who had once held sway over much of Europe came in claustrophobic obscurity. Yet it was in many respects the climactic moment of the Second World War, a war he had unleashed on humanity in September 1939 at an ultimate cost of tens of millions dead and the devastation of large swathes of the continent. However, it was not until late the following day, May 1, that the epoch-making news was broken to Germany and the world. It came via the Reichssender radio station in Hamburg, the last short wave public transmitter in Germany, which earlier in the war had often been used to broadcast propaganda to Britain, most notably by William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw).

Throughout that evening, listeners had been regularly warned to prepare for an important announcement. In between, the music of Hitler’s favourite composer Richard Wagner was played, including excerpts from his opera Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). Then at 10.30pm came a roll of drums and an announcer intoned: ‘It is reported from the Fuhrer’s headquarters that our Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery.’

The announcement was followed by the national anthem and the Nazi anthemHorst-Wessel-Lied (The Horst Wessel Song), more drum-rolls, and a three-minute silence. Listeners next heard from Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, Hitler’s appointed successor. He said: ‘At an early date the Fuhrer had recognised the frightful danger of Bolshevism and dedicated his existence to this struggle. At the end of his struggle, of his unswerving straight road of life, stands his hero’s death in the capital of the German Reich.’

In Britain, the broadcast was picked up by the BBC monitoring service and a news bulletin was quickly prepared. Listeners were enjoying the evening edition of Music While You Work with Robin Richmond and his Sextet when they were told: ‘We are interrupting our programmes to bring you a newsflash.’

The word newsflash was rarely used by the staid BBC, so this was obviously something big. The corporation’s Chief Announcer, Stuart Hibberd, then came on air and said: ‘This is London calling. Here is a newsflash. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead. I’ll repeat that. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.’

Hitler undoubtedly was dead. However, once the Soviets took control of the Chancellery on May 2, the subsequent narrative of what had happened to him was turned on its head. It became a bewildering maelstrom of conjecture, confusion, cover-up, conspiracy and misinformation. One of its main themes, promoted by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, was that Hitler was still alive.

The British military authorities in Berlin were anxious to get to the truth and Major Hugh Trevor-Roper, an Intelligence Corps officer, was ordered to investigate. The Soviets were not co-operative. But he interviewed occupants of the bunker who had escaped capture and by November 1945 had pieced together what he said was the actual sequence of events. In 1947, his report was published as a best-selling book, The Last Days of Hitler.

Trevor-Roper concluded that after Hitler and Braun killed themselves, their bodies were carried out of the bunker into the Chancellery garden and placed in a shallow bomb crater, where they were set alight with petrol. With the building under heavy bombardment and Soviet troops only a few hundred yards away, the attempted cremation was carried out in haste and the corpses were only partially burned. Later that night, the charred remains were retrieved and buried at the bottom of a nearby 9ft deep bomb crater.

Once the Chancellery was captured, a special squad from SMERSH – the fearsome Soviet counter-espionage corps – was dispatched to the bunker by Stalin to determine Hitler’s fate. After interrogating surviving members of the Fuhrer’s entourage, they quickly established that he was dead and found the two buried bodies, which were removed. Part of Hitler’s skull was missing, but his jaw was intact and dental records are said to have confirmed his identity and that of his wife. Then SS bodyguard Harry Mengershausen, who had helped with the burial, was taken to a wooded area outside Berlin, where the SMERSH agents showed him the two exhumed bodies. He positively identified them as Hitler and Braun.

Initially, Soviet military chiefs publicly accepted that Hitler was dead. But they later backtracked as Stalin’s misinformation campaign was launched to fuel speculation that the Fuhrer was still alive and had escaped, possibly to Spain or South America. His reasons for propagating the myth are obscure. Did he really believe Hitler had escaped? Possibly. Or did he just want to sow doubts among the Allies and use the threat of a Nazi renaissance to tighten his grip on Eastern Europe?

In 1946, Stalin sent a second SMERSH team to search the Chancellery crater where the bodies had been recovered. They found a skull fragment holed by the exit wound of a bullet. It seemed certain it belonged to Hitler and was incontrovertible proof of his death. 

However, it was not until 1950 that the Soviets tacitly acknowledged in a documentary film about the fall of Berlin that Hitler was dead. Even so, they claimed he had died of cyanide poisoning rather than taking the ‘soldierly’ option of shooting himself. There was speculation in the 1979 book The Berlin Bunker by American author James P O’Donnell that Hitler had bitten on a cyanide capsule at the same moment he pulled the trigger. Other rumours claimed he had taken cyanide and was then finished off with a gunshot by one of his aides. You could take your pick of many such stories. Despite the overwhelming evidence of the Fuhrer’s straightforward demise, the confusion stirred by Stalin gave rise to a whole industry of ‘Hitler survived’ mythology that remains active to this day.

As for the immediate effect of the dictator’s death, although the news was received with satisfaction and celebration among the Allied nations, it did not stop the war. In his May 1 broadcast, Doenitz vowed to carry on fighting, saying: ‘It is my first task to save Germany from destruction by the advancing Bolshevist enemy. For this aim alone the military struggle continues. As far and for so long as achievement of this aim is impeded by the British and the Americans, we shall be forced to carry on our defensive fight against them as well.’ 

The decision enabled around 1.8million German soldiers to flee westwards and surrender to the British and Americans rather than the Soviets. Then on May 4, Doenitz sent envoys to British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery at Luneberg Heath near Hamburg to sign an unconditional surrender of German forces in north-west Germany, Holland and Denmark. On May 7 in Reims, north-east of Paris, a full surrender of all German forces was signed, followed by a further signing in Berlin the next day, to accommodate Soviet demands. The war in Europe was over and May 8 was dubbed VE-Day – Victory in Europe Day.

After the war, Hugh Trevor-Roper pursued a successful career as a historian and academic, and in 1979 was raised to the peerage as Lord Dacre. But his reputation was seriously damaged in 1983 when he authenticated the so-called Hitler diaries, which were published in the Sunday Times before they were exposed as forgeries.

And what of Hitler? In 1938, in the manner of an emperor, he had outlined elaborate plans for his eventual funeral, envisaging himself lying forever in honour and glory as Germany’s conquering hero. He said he initially wanted his body to be displayed on a catafalque in front of the Feldherrnhalle (Field Marshals’ Hall) in Munich. It was there in 1923 that his attempt to seize power in the shambolic beer hall putsch had been thwarted in a bloody gun battle with police. After a ‘solemn but simple’ state funeral, his corpse would then be removed to the Temple of National Socialism on the city’s Koenigsplatz, where the remains of 15 Nazis killed in the putsch were already enshrined as martyrs. Hitler said: ‘There I shall rest under the eternal flame.’

There was to be no eternal flame for the Fuhrer. In June 1945, the Soviets buried his body and that of his wife in a forest near the town of Rathenow, 45 miles west of Berlin. The corpses were later exhumed and reburied 50 miles further south in the Soviet Army’s garrison in Magdeburg. Finally, in 1970, the KGB dug up the bodies, cremated them, ground the remains into ashes and scattered them in a river. Only Hitler’s jawbone and the skull fragment were preserved, being deposited in the Soviet archives in Moscow.

Then, in 2009 came a further dramatic twist in the saga when the Russians allowed an American geneticist to carry out DNA tests on samples taken from the skull fragment. The results were sensational – they revealed it was not a male skull, but that of a woman between 20 and 40 years old. 

So if it wasn’t Hitler, was it the remains of Eva Braun? Although at 33 she was in the age range indicated by the analysis, it was thought unlikely to be her, because there had never been any evidence of her shooting herself or being shot.