French coroners have reportedly proved that a corpse which Soviet authorities said in 1945 was that of Adolf Hitler was in fact that of someone else.
The four forensic specialists, who wrote up this finding in the journal Semaine en Hopitaux (Hospital Week), base their theory on careful examination of documents prepared by the Soviet army coroners who performed the autopsy on that body on May 8, 1945.
The doctors, who work at the Lille Institute for Social and Legal Medicine, write that the real body of Hitler was in fact discovered by the Soviets at the end of May 1945.
It was “shown in a wood near Berlin to Mengershausen, the last German soldier to have seen it in the garden of the (Berlin) Chancery.
“Mengershausen, in spite of the body’s advanced state of decay, identified the corpse as that of Hitler,” they write.
The skull of that body had a hole in the right temple, in keeping with the belief that Hitler shot himself in the head.
Hitler left a will, dated April 29, 1945, saying that his and his bride Eva Braun’s wish was to “die and be cremated right away.”
The next day at 3:30 p.m., Hitler and Braun allegedly committed suicide in his bunker below the chancery. Their bodies were said to have been sprayed with gasoline and burned, and the charred remnants were reportedly buried in a nearby excavation.
A few days later, the Soviet army exhumed corpses from the garden of the Berlin Chancery. The most charred body was assumed to be Hitler’s.
Soviet army Col. Dr. Faust Shkarawsky performed an autopsy on the corpse together with three other Soviet forensic specialists. Their report, signed May 11, 1945, clearly depicts a “mock autopsy” performed on orders, the French coroners write.
This was done, the French doctors say, to assuage Josef Stalin, who was demanding to see Hitler’s corpse at once.
The French coroners write that in this way Stalin was provided with an immediate, plausible Hitler.
Two questions remain to be solved: whose corpse was taken to Moscow and shown to Stalin? And where is the actual corpse of Hitler?
Recently, the director of the Russian National Archive told journalists that Hitler’s skull is kept in Moscow.
The same information was provided 40 years ago by a member of Hitler’s entourage, German army officer Karl Schneider, according to the French daily Le Monde.
The French coroners — Eric Laurier, Valery Hedouin, Didier Gosset and Pierre Henri Muller — would now like to see the skull that is kept in Moscow.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
