Mystery Quest – Hitler’s Escape

Adolf Hitler was one of the most vicious people in modern history. It is assumed he killed himself, but there is no evidence of his death. Near the final days of World War II when the Russians were surrounding Berlin, Hitler and his wife went down to their underground bunker and killed themselves. At least that is what his guards have said. They said they heard the shot and opened the door to find Hitler lying bloody and dead on the couch, and his wife next to him, poisoned to death.

The guards said they then took the body of Hitler outside and burned it then buried it. Apparently, Hitler did not want his lifeless body on display like Mussolini’s corpse had been.

Mystery Quest takes up the challenge of finding clues of Hitler’s death. There has been speculation that he escaped and might have gone to South America. Other people have said they had seen him around other parts of Germany. Whatever the stories, there is no evidence of a dead body belonging to Adolf Hitler.

Hitler used a double, especially after the close attempt on his life in the Valkyrie incident. What the Russians found when they arrived in Berlin, was the dead body of a man looking like Hitler, but in all accounts was his double. This man was apparently two inches shorter than Adolf Hitler.

In the Russian archived they have a couch with blood stains and a piece of a skull with a bullet hole in it. Mystery Quest sent an American archaeologist to Russia to get evidence from these items and bring it back to the United States to see if there was any DNA that could be found in the blood or the burned skull.

Dental detective work gets to the root of Hitler mystery

A NEW portrait of Adolf Hitler's last days before he committed suicide in the Berlin bunker emerged yesterday, revealing how the Nazi leader was tormented by tooth decay, abscesses and gum disease that caused "terrible bad breath".
The whole tooth: Prof Michel Perrier with some of the photographic evidence used to confirm that remains found in 1945 were Hitler's The study of film footage of Hitler, enhanced by a computer, has confirmed that remains found by the Russians in 1945 were his, helping to end half a century of speculation about his fate and validating an identification technique of increasing value to forensic scientists.
A paper was presented yesterday at an international conference in London by Prof Michel Perrier, 52, of the University of Lausanne, and will be published in the Journal of Forensic Science. It links newsreel footage with X-rays of Hitler's skull, jaw remains found in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery garden and his dental records.
Even if Hitler had a double, so many characteristics in his teeth match in each source of evidence that Prof Perrier said yesterday he had no doubt that Hitler died in the bunker.
Hitler married his mistress, Eva Braun, during the night of April 28/29, as Soviet troops advanced towards his bunker complex. On April 30 he committed suicide with his wife. In accordance with his instructions, their bodies were burned.
Russian forces found the remains and conducted the autopsy of the bodies the following month, said Prof Perrier. "What they found were charred pieces of bone, such as pieces of skull, the lower jaw and part of the upper jaw consisting of a bridge with nine units."
Nothing was revealed to the public until 1968, fuelling speculation about Hitler's fate. That year a book by Lev Bezymenski contained a description of Hitler's autopsy and his remains.
The jaw remains were compared with dental evidence given to the Americans by Hitler's American-trained dentist, Hugo Blaschke, who had been arrested in 1945. Blaschke, an SS general, had treated Hitler from 1934 until shortly before his death.
When his testimony was added to that of his assistant, Kate Hausermann, there was a great deal of material to check the jaw remains against, and they seemed to match. "Hitler had very bad teeth. He had periodontal disease. He had many reconstructions, some done before the time of Blaschke," said Prof Perrier.
There were no X-rays of Hitler's jaw available at the time, which could have helped to provide even better confirmation. Then, in 1972, archives in Washington released five X-rays of Hitler's head, taken on July 20, 1944. They revealed bridge work, periodontal (gum) disease and "very unusual dental work", said Prof Perrier. These matched Blaschke's evidence and the Russian autopsy.
Prof Perrier has now provided further evidence to link the remains in the bunker to footage of the Führer. He combed Swiss archives for newsreels of Hitler and produced computer-enhanced images of his teeth to compare with the autopsy, X-rays and Blaschke's report. Prof Perrier found clear-cut matches between the computer-enhanced footage of Hitler's teeth and the bunker remains.
Hitler once referred to his dental problems openly, albeit indirectly, after negotiations with General Franco. Hitler's interpreter, Paul Schmidt, wrote that "they talked to or rather at one another" until 2am and failed to agree on anything. Hitler later told Mussolini he would "rather have two or three teeth out than go through that again".

Hitler, Stalin, and "Operation Myth"

Source: CIA Article

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An exhibit titled "The Agony of the Third Reich: Retribution," which opened last April at the Russian State Archives in Moscow, celebrates the 55th anniversary of the Red Army's capture of Berlin and victory over Nazi Germany. On display are such trophies as Adolf Hitler's and Josef Göbbels' personal papers, Martin Bormann's diary, the surrender agreement ending the Soviet-German war, several of the Führer's uniforms, and a blood-stained section of the sofa where Hitler shot himself after swallowing a cyanide ampoule. The artifacts are from the State Archives as well as the holdings of the Foreign Ministry and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).

Hitler's Skull?

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a fragment of a human skull measuring about 3 x 4 inches, approximately the size of a hand. The fragment has jagged edges and a bullet hole on one side. It is one of four such fragments that a Red Army soldier found in a bomb crater turned into a makeshift grave in the garden of Hitler's Reichskanzelei (Imperial Chancellery) in Berlin. Russia's chief archivist says he is "99.9 percent" certain the fragment was once part of Adolf Hitler's cranium.

The Russian curators apparently do not lack a sense of irony. One of the displays is an interrogation report from an SS officer who served as Hitler's adjutant. In it, the SS man claims that Hitler ordered him to burn his mortal remains because he did not want to end up on display in the Soviet Union. So in a way the Russians had the last laugh, thwarting what may have been the Führer's final order.

Lord Dacre, better known as former Oxford professor Hugh Trevor-Roper and the author of Hitler's Last Days, called the exhibit "sordid." Macabre might be a better word. Ostensibly, it celebrates Russia's VE Day, which falls on the 9th of May, the official opening date. But the actual opening date, 30 April, was--not by coincidence--the anniversary of Hitler's suicide in the Führerbunker located beneath the garden of the bombed-out Reichskanzelei, once the seat of the Nazi government. By exhibiting the skull fragments and other Hitler memorabilia, the Russians are in effect finally exorcising the Führer's ghost and closing the books on one of the most bizarre Soviet intelligence operations of the Cold War--Operatsiya Mif (Operation Myth).

The Hitler Myth
The Soviet government kept the Hitler file completely secret until 1968, when it revealed some of the truth--along with some deliberate distortions--in the West but not in the USSR. That was the year in which a journalist named Lev Bezymensky published the results of the official Soviet investigation into Hitler's death and two autopsies performed on the Nazi leader's remains. The book appeared in English in the United States and Britain, but not in Russian and not in the USSR. In 1993, the Yeltsin government granted access to the KGB's Mif files and released photographs of the skull fragments to a Russian and a British journalist. But their book also was published only in English and only in the United States and Britain. Now, thanks to the Moscow exhibit, foreigners will be able to examine artifacts that they may have heard about but were never allowed to see, while Russians will see for the first time objects and documents that they never knew existed.

By late March 1945, the Red Army had encircled Berlin and begun its final assault with a massive artillery shelling. The Germans' strong resistance, however, forced the Soviets to fight block by block and house by house before they raised the hammer-and-sickle ensign over the Reichstag. Stalin dispatched special "trophy brigades," organized by Smersh (military counterintelligence), to search for art and other valuables, official records and archives, and anything else of exceptional material and intelligence value. But the most prized trophy was Hitler himself, and selected Smershisti received extensive briefings on how to locate and identify the Führer. On 4 May, a unit attached to the 79th Rifle Corps of the Third Shock Army and under the command of Lt. Col. Ivan Klimenko discovered the badly charred remains of 11 humans and two animals (Hitler's dogs) in shallow graves--actually bomb craters--a few meters away from the entrance to the bunker, where Hitler and his entourage had taken refuge since March.

The badly burned bodies were taken to a clinic commandeered as a makeshift morgue in the north Berlin suburb of Buch, where a four-man military medical team headed by a physician with the improbable name of Dr. Faust Shkravaski concluded that Hitler's remains were among those found near the bunker. Shkravaski did not have much to work with, but there was enough left of Hitler's teeth, lower jaw, and dental work to make a positive identification. Odontological evidence collected from the office of Hitler's dentist, the dentist's assistant, and a dental technician who had made bridgework for the Führer formed the basis of the evidence. By 9 May, when the autopsies were completed, the Soviets knew that Hitler was dead.

Stalin and Operation Myth

But the one man whose opinion mattered the most--Josef Stalin--refused to accept the findings recorded in Shkravaski's forensic report. He dispatched his secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, to Berlin to review the autopsy results and associated evidence and bring everything back to Moscow. (For reasons that remain unclear, however, Smersh had already removed and reburied the human and canine corpses that Shkravaski's team had examined, and refused to dig them up and turn them over to the secret police.) Stalin rejected the autopsy's conclusions out of hand.

Then, on 26 May, during a Kremlin meeting with President Roosevelt's chief adviser Harry Hopkins, and diplomats Averell Harriman and Charles (Chip) Bohlen, Stalin said that he believed Hitler had escaped from Berlin and was hiding in the West. Stalin was not making diplomatic small talk; he was launching a disinformation campaign that he had personally devised and directed.

The next version of this myth appeared in the 28 May edition of Time, which featured Hitler's portrait on its cover with a large cross through it. According to a certain "Pvt. Ivan Nikitin," a German SS officer had revealed under interrogation that he had heard Hitler ranting and raving about a coming conflict between the USSR and its western Allies once the war had concluded. (Hitler, in fact, anticipated the Cold War in a document known as "My Political Testament.") But, "Nikitin" claimed, Hitler said that as long as he was still alive the wartime alliance would remain intact. The world would have to be convinced that he was dead. Once the former allies found themselves in conflict, he would reappear and lead the German people to their final victory over Bolshevism. The same "Nikitin" claimed that behind an armoire in the bunker was a moveable concrete wall with a man-size hole in it. On the other side of the wall was a passageway leading to a tunnel where an army troop train was waiting to take Hitler and his entourage to safety.
Next, Stalin dispatched Andrei Vyshinsky, the notorious prosecutor in the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s, to Berlin to brief Marshal Georgy Zhukov on the new line on Hitler. (Zhukov said on record that he believed Hitler was dead.) The Soviet marshal was at the height of his fame and popularity, and had been called the greatest Russian commander since Suvorov. For Stalin, who feared and usually eliminated potential rivals, it was time to cut him down to size. At a 9 June press conference--the first since the Western press had been allowed into the Soviet-controlled city--Zhukov, with Vyshinsky at his side, offered a new version of Hitler's fate. The Führer's "present whereabouts are unknown," he said. Zhukov denied reports circulating in Berlin that the Soviets had found a corpse that "could be Hitler's." He added that: "Based on personal and official information, we can only say that Hitler had a chance to get away with his bride [Eva Braun, who married the Führer hours before they committed suicide]. Hitler could have flown out at the very last minute." Zhukov's "personal view" was that Hitler had taken refuge in Spain.

The new Soviet version went out over the press wires the next day, providing grist for hundreds if not thousands of Hitler sightings for many years to come. Vyshinsky then accompanied Zhukov to Frankfurt, where the marshal briefed Gen. Eisenhower on the new Soviet line. Eisenhower later told the press that he had changed his mind about Hitler and believed the Nazi dictator might still be alive.

In July Stalin acted again. At the Big Three summit in Potsdam, Germany, Stalin told US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes that he believed Hitler was living in Spain or Argentina. He repeated this in the presence of Adm. William D. Leahy, President Truman's military adviser. On other occasions, Stalin speculated that Hitler had made his way to Hamburg and left Germany for Japan on board a U-boat; or that he was hiding in Germany in the British occupation zone.

Operation Myth was officially launched in December 1945. Its mission was threefold: To (1) gather and review all records and forensic evidence collected during May-June 1945; (2) check and recheck interrogation reports from Hitler's bunker entourage; and (3) reconcile or explain inconsistencies and contradictions in the evidence. A commission chaired by the USSR's preeminent criminologist, Dr. Pytor Semenovsky, and controlled from behind the scenes by Beria, began by tearing up Shkravaski's autopsy and rejecting the evidence on which it was based. This gives some idea of what the commission's unstated purpose was: to produce a report that confirmed or at least was compatible with Stalin's belief that Hitler was--or at least might be--still alive. After reexamining all the evidence, the Semenovsky commission concluded it was "not...possible to arrive at a final conclusion" regarding Hitler. That may have been less decisive than Stalin wanted, but apparently it was as far as the scientists believed they could go in stretching the truth to please Stalin.

Above all, the brutal interrogation of witnesses demonstrated how obsessed Stalin was with finding proof that Hitler might be alive. Smersh detained some 800 (!) persons, and 21 of 35 key witnesses were arrested and interrogated in Berlin and Moscow--often repeatedly and brutally. Some of the witnesses were imprisoned for 10 years or more on trumped up war crimes charges. The Soviets went to great lengths to locate Hitler's relatives. They even arrested his half-sister, a simple Austrian peasant woman whom Hitler had last seen in 1907, as well as her husband and a half-brother Hitler had never even laid eyes on. The focus of the endless interrogations, which filled tens of thousands of pages, was to prove that Hitler could have survived and that the people he spent his last days with had engaged in a systematic deception to convince the world otherwise.

The Smershisti tried to beat confessions out of their prisoners. Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, was stripped, tied down, and then beaten with whips as his German-speaking interrogators shouted: "Hitler is alive! Hitler is alive!" Two other key witnesses, Hitler's SS adjutant Otto Günsche, and the Führer's personal pilot, Hans Baur, reported similar experiences after returning home in 1956. In Baur's case, interrogators spent hours trying to force him to admit that it had been possible for Hitler to fly out of the Berlin inferno. Witnesses were forced to write and rewrite their accounts of the final days in the bunker. The Soviets even partially reconstructed the bunker and, using mannequins, had witnesses reenact Hitler's and Eva Braun's suicides. Tables and charts were used to plot testimonies against one another in an effort to identify inconsistencies as well as corroborating information.

Imprisoning Hitler's entourage was not aimed so much at uncovering the truth as concealing it. Other steps were taken in the same direction. Stalin ordered that the human and animal remains found in Berlin be hidden. (Strangely, he did not demand their return to Moscow, where they presumably would have been of value to Semenovsky's team.) The Smershisti buried the remains first in Rathenow, then in Stendal. In February 1946, in Magdeburg, the remains were finally buried in the courtyard of an apartment house commandeered by the Red Army. There they remained until April 1970, when KGB chief Yuri Andropov, with Politburo approval, ordered Meropriyatiya Arkhiv (Measure or Operation Archive). Under the guise of searching for long-lost Nazi records, a KGB team excavated what was by then a garage on a Soviet military base and removed the remains of nine persons, including Hitler and Eva Braun. (The base was about to be turned over to the East German government.) The remains, now a "jellied mass" according to a KGB report, were pulverized, soaked in gasoline, and then completely burned up. The ashes were mixed with coal particles and then taken 11 kilometers north of Magdeburg, where they were dumped into the Bideriz, a tributary of the Elbe river.

Hitler Is Alive and Well and Living In...
Why did Stalin go to such lengths to deceive the West while trying to convince himself that Hitler could still be alive? The short answer is: no one knows. Some historians believe that the Soviet dictator wanted to send Western intelligence services on a never-ending wild-goose chase. Whether that was his purpose or not, that in fact is what happened. For 30 years the FBI investigated every report it received regarding Hitler sightings or claims that the Führer was still alive. (A 734-page file of such reports is available on the Internet.) The Bureau conducted its own 11-year probe into the possibility that Hitler had escaped and was still alive. Other historians maintain that Stalin manipulated the Hitler myth to put the onus on the West for "hiding" the German dictator and protecting Nazi war criminals or that he wanted to use rumors that Hitler was in Spain to settle an old score with Franco and avenge the communist defeat in the Spanish Civil War.

From the very first day, Stalin had the idea that Hitler could have escaped to Spain (as quoted by Trevor-Roper). General Berazin said: "My opinion is that Hitler has gone into hiding and is somewhere in Europe, possible with General Franco". Stalin said that he was alive "in hiding... possibly with General Franco". Pravda declared in an article entitled "Hitler's Agent, General Franco!" (6 July, 1945) that the Fascist regimen in Spain should be destroyed as soon as possible.

Some historians have focused on the Hitler myth to question whether Stalin was rational. A clever, cunning, and malicious Stalin might have misled and lied to his top aides and wartime allies for some inexplicable political or psychological purpose and still have been rational. But the fantastic effort carried out under the rubric of Mif suggests something else--that Stalin was trying to bend the evidence to conform to his own distorted version of reality. Here Stalin was not attempting to mislead someone else but was trying to prove his own delusion--or at least destroy the evidence that contradicted it.

None of this would have occurred if there had been a corpus delecti. Or would it have? Even with a corpse in better condition at hand, would Stalin have buried and reburied the body, as he did the remains, to cover up the evidence of Hitler's death?

What about the skull fragments? The first autopsy noted that a piece of the cranium was missing. In early 1946, a Smersh unit sent to search the area where Hitler's remains had been found discovered the fragments, and apparently they fit the skull that had been examined in Buch. We do not know when or how the skull fragments reached Moscow. We do know that they were stored in the NKVD/KGB/FBS archives and that their existence was not revealed until 1995--and then only in the West, and not in Russia until this past April! Today, just as in 1945, the skull fragments may hold the final answer. Genetic testing should be able to determine once and for all whether they are the missing pieces of Hitler's cranium. Some of Hitler's closest relatives disappeared into Stalin's Gulag, but others, including several of his closest relatives living in the United States, survived. The Russian government, however, cannot afford expensive test procedures; although it is willing to let someone else pick up the tab. So far, no one has offered to do so. In the final analysis, this lack of interest in Hitler and the end of the Third Reich, while disappointing to historians, may not be a bad thing.

Hitler, Stalin, and "Operation Myth"

Source: CIA Article

---

An exhibit titled "The Agony of the Third Reich: Retribution," which opened last April at the Russian State Archives in Moscow, celebrates the 55th anniversary of the Red Army's capture of Berlin and victory over Nazi Germany. On display are such trophies as Adolf Hitler's and Josef Göbbels' personal papers, Martin Bormann's diary, the surrender agreement ending the Soviet-German war, several of the Führer's uniforms, and a blood-stained section of the sofa where Hitler shot himself after swallowing a cyanide ampoule. The artifacts are from the State Archives as well as the holdings of the Foreign Ministry and the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).

Hitler's Skull?

The centerpiece of the exhibit is a fragment of a human skull measuring about 3 x 4 inches, approximately the size of a hand. The fragment has jagged edges and a bullet hole on one side. It is one of four such fragments that a Red Army soldier found in a bomb crater turned into a makeshift grave in the garden of Hitler's Reichskanzelei (Imperial Chancellery) in Berlin. Russia's chief archivist says he is "99.9 percent" certain the fragment was once part of Adolf Hitler's cranium.

The Russian curators apparently do not lack a sense of irony. One of the displays is an interrogation report from an SS officer who served as Hitler's adjutant. In it, the SS man claims that Hitler ordered him to burn his mortal remains because he did not want to end up on display in the Soviet Union. So in a way the Russians had the last laugh, thwarting what may have been the Führer's final order.

Lord Dacre, better known as former Oxford professor Hugh Trevor-Roper and the author of Hitler's Last Days, called the exhibit "sordid." Macabre might be a better word. Ostensibly, it celebrates Russia's VE Day, which falls on the 9th of May, the official opening date. But the actual opening date, 30 April, was--not by coincidence--the anniversary of Hitler's suicide in the Führerbunker located beneath the garden of the bombed-out Reichskanzelei, once the seat of the Nazi government. By exhibiting the skull fragments and other Hitler memorabilia, the Russians are in effect finally exorcising the Führer's ghost and closing the books on one of the most bizarre Soviet intelligence operations of the Cold War--Operatsiya Mif (Operation Myth).

The Hitler Myth
The Soviet government kept the Hitler file completely secret until 1968, when it revealed some of the truth--along with some deliberate distortions--in the West but not in the USSR. That was the year in which a journalist named Lev Bezymensky published the results of the official Soviet investigation into Hitler's death and two autopsies performed on the Nazi leader's remains. The book appeared in English in the United States and Britain, but not in Russian and not in the USSR. In 1993, the Yeltsin government granted access to the KGB's Mif files and released photographs of the skull fragments to a Russian and a British journalist. But their book also was published only in English and only in the United States and Britain. Now, thanks to the Moscow exhibit, foreigners will be able to examine artifacts that they may have heard about but were never allowed to see, while Russians will see for the first time objects and documents that they never knew existed.

By late March 1945, the Red Army had encircled Berlin and begun its final assault with a massive artillery shelling. The Germans' strong resistance, however, forced the Soviets to fight block by block and house by house before they raised the hammer-and-sickle ensign over the Reichstag. Stalin dispatched special "trophy brigades," organized by Smersh (military counterintelligence), to search for art and other valuables, official records and archives, and anything else of exceptional material and intelligence value. But the most prized trophy was Hitler himself, and selected Smershisti received extensive briefings on how to locate and identify the Führer. On 4 May, a unit attached to the 79th Rifle Corps of the Third Shock Army and under the command of Lt. Col. Ivan Klimenko discovered the badly charred remains of 11 humans and two animals (Hitler's dogs) in shallow graves--actually bomb craters--a few meters away from the entrance to the bunker, where Hitler and his entourage had taken refuge since March.

The badly burned bodies were taken to a clinic commandeered as a makeshift morgue in the north Berlin suburb of Buch, where a four-man military medical team headed by a physician with the improbable name of Dr. Faust Shkravaski concluded that Hitler's remains were among those found near the bunker. Shkravaski did not have much to work with, but there was enough left of Hitler's teeth, lower jaw, and dental work to make a positive identification. Odontological evidence collected from the office of Hitler's dentist, the dentist's assistant, and a dental technician who had made bridgework for the Führer formed the basis of the evidence. By 9 May, when the autopsies were completed, the Soviets knew that Hitler was dead.

Stalin and Operation Myth

But the one man whose opinion mattered the most--Josef Stalin--refused to accept the findings recorded in Shkravaski's forensic report. He dispatched his secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, to Berlin to review the autopsy results and associated evidence and bring everything back to Moscow. (For reasons that remain unclear, however, Smersh had already removed and reburied the human and canine corpses that Shkravaski's team had examined, and refused to dig them up and turn them over to the secret police.) Stalin rejected the autopsy's conclusions out of hand.

Then, on 26 May, during a Kremlin meeting with President Roosevelt's chief adviser Harry Hopkins, and diplomats Averell Harriman and Charles (Chip) Bohlen, Stalin said that he believed Hitler had escaped from Berlin and was hiding in the West. Stalin was not making diplomatic small talk; he was launching a disinformation campaign that he had personally devised and directed.

The next version of this myth appeared in the 28 May edition of Time, which featured Hitler's portrait on its cover with a large cross through it. According to a certain "Pvt. Ivan Nikitin," a German SS officer had revealed under interrogation that he had heard Hitler ranting and raving about a coming conflict between the USSR and its western Allies once the war had concluded. (Hitler, in fact, anticipated the Cold War in a document known as "My Political Testament.") But, "Nikitin" claimed, Hitler said that as long as he was still alive the wartime alliance would remain intact. The world would have to be convinced that he was dead. Once the former allies found themselves in conflict, he would reappear and lead the German people to their final victory over Bolshevism. The same "Nikitin" claimed that behind an armoire in the bunker was a moveable concrete wall with a man-size hole in it. On the other side of the wall was a passageway leading to a tunnel where an army troop train was waiting to take Hitler and his entourage to safety.
Next, Stalin dispatched Andrei Vyshinsky, the notorious prosecutor in the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s, to Berlin to brief Marshal Georgy Zhukov on the new line on Hitler. (Zhukov said on record that he believed Hitler was dead.) The Soviet marshal was at the height of his fame and popularity, and had been called the greatest Russian commander since Suvorov. For Stalin, who feared and usually eliminated potential rivals, it was time to cut him down to size. At a 9 June press conference--the first since the Western press had been allowed into the Soviet-controlled city--Zhukov, with Vyshinsky at his side, offered a new version of Hitler's fate. The Führer's "present whereabouts are unknown," he said. Zhukov denied reports circulating in Berlin that the Soviets had found a corpse that "could be Hitler's." He added that: "Based on personal and official information, we can only say that Hitler had a chance to get away with his bride [Eva Braun, who married the Führer hours before they committed suicide]. Hitler could have flown out at the very last minute." Zhukov's "personal view" was that Hitler had taken refuge in Spain.

The new Soviet version went out over the press wires the next day, providing grist for hundreds if not thousands of Hitler sightings for many years to come. Vyshinsky then accompanied Zhukov to Frankfurt, where the marshal briefed Gen. Eisenhower on the new Soviet line. Eisenhower later told the press that he had changed his mind about Hitler and believed the Nazi dictator might still be alive.

In July Stalin acted again. At the Big Three summit in Potsdam, Germany, Stalin told US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes that he believed Hitler was living in Spain or Argentina. He repeated this in the presence of Adm. William D. Leahy, President Truman's military adviser. On other occasions, Stalin speculated that Hitler had made his way to Hamburg and left Germany for Japan on board a U-boat; or that he was hiding in Germany in the British occupation zone.

Operation Myth was officially launched in December 1945. Its mission was threefold: To (1) gather and review all records and forensic evidence collected during May-June 1945; (2) check and recheck interrogation reports from Hitler's bunker entourage; and (3) reconcile or explain inconsistencies and contradictions in the evidence. A commission chaired by the USSR's preeminent criminologist, Dr. Pytor Semenovsky, and controlled from behind the scenes by Beria, began by tearing up Shkravaski's autopsy and rejecting the evidence on which it was based. This gives some idea of what the commission's unstated purpose was: to produce a report that confirmed or at least was compatible with Stalin's belief that Hitler was--or at least might be--still alive. After reexamining all the evidence, the Semenovsky commission concluded it was "not...possible to arrive at a final conclusion" regarding Hitler. That may have been less decisive than Stalin wanted, but apparently it was as far as the scientists believed they could go in stretching the truth to please Stalin.

Above all, the brutal interrogation of witnesses demonstrated how obsessed Stalin was with finding proof that Hitler might be alive. Smersh detained some 800 (!) persons, and 21 of 35 key witnesses were arrested and interrogated in Berlin and Moscow--often repeatedly and brutally. Some of the witnesses were imprisoned for 10 years or more on trumped up war crimes charges. The Soviets went to great lengths to locate Hitler's relatives. They even arrested his half-sister, a simple Austrian peasant woman whom Hitler had last seen in 1907, as well as her husband and a half-brother Hitler had never even laid eyes on. The focus of the endless interrogations, which filled tens of thousands of pages, was to prove that Hitler could have survived and that the people he spent his last days with had engaged in a systematic deception to convince the world otherwise.

The Smershisti tried to beat confessions out of their prisoners. Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, was stripped, tied down, and then beaten with whips as his German-speaking interrogators shouted: "Hitler is alive! Hitler is alive!" Two other key witnesses, Hitler's SS adjutant Otto Günsche, and the Führer's personal pilot, Hans Baur, reported similar experiences after returning home in 1956. In Baur's case, interrogators spent hours trying to force him to admit that it had been possible for Hitler to fly out of the Berlin inferno. Witnesses were forced to write and rewrite their accounts of the final days in the bunker. The Soviets even partially reconstructed the bunker and, using mannequins, had witnesses reenact Hitler's and Eva Braun's suicides. Tables and charts were used to plot testimonies against one another in an effort to identify inconsistencies as well as corroborating information.

Imprisoning Hitler's entourage was not aimed so much at uncovering the truth as concealing it. Other steps were taken in the same direction. Stalin ordered that the human and animal remains found in Berlin be hidden. (Strangely, he did not demand their return to Moscow, where they presumably would have been of value to Semenovsky's team.) The Smershisti buried the remains first in Rathenow, then in Stendal. In February 1946, in Magdeburg, the remains were finally buried in the courtyard of an apartment house commandeered by the Red Army. There they remained until April 1970, when KGB chief Yuri Andropov, with Politburo approval, ordered Meropriyatiya Arkhiv (Measure or Operation Archive). Under the guise of searching for long-lost Nazi records, a KGB team excavated what was by then a garage on a Soviet military base and removed the remains of nine persons, including Hitler and Eva Braun. (The base was about to be turned over to the East German government.) The remains, now a "jellied mass" according to a KGB report, were pulverized, soaked in gasoline, and then completely burned up. The ashes were mixed with coal particles and then taken 11 kilometers north of Magdeburg, where they were dumped into the Bideriz, a tributary of the Elbe river.

Hitler Is Alive and Well and Living In...
Why did Stalin go to such lengths to deceive the West while trying to convince himself that Hitler could still be alive? The short answer is: no one knows. Some historians believe that the Soviet dictator wanted to send Western intelligence services on a never-ending wild-goose chase. Whether that was his purpose or not, that in fact is what happened. For 30 years the FBI investigated every report it received regarding Hitler sightings or claims that the Führer was still alive. (A 734-page file of such reports is available on the Internet.) The Bureau conducted its own 11-year probe into the possibility that Hitler had escaped and was still alive. Other historians maintain that Stalin manipulated the Hitler myth to put the onus on the West for "hiding" the German dictator and protecting Nazi war criminals or that he wanted to use rumors that Hitler was in Spain to settle an old score with Franco and avenge the communist defeat in the Spanish Civil War.

From the very first day, Stalin had the idea that Hitler could have escaped to Spain (as quoted by Trevor-Roper). General Berazin said: "My opinion is that Hitler has gone into hiding and is somewhere in Europe, possible with General Franco". Stalin said that he was alive "in hiding... possibly with General Franco". Pravda declared in an article entitled "Hitler's Agent, General Franco!" (6 July, 1945) that the Fascist regimen in Spain should be destroyed as soon as possible.

Some historians have focused on the Hitler myth to question whether Stalin was rational. A clever, cunning, and malicious Stalin might have misled and lied to his top aides and wartime allies for some inexplicable political or psychological purpose and still have been rational. But the fantastic effort carried out under the rubric of Mif suggests something else--that Stalin was trying to bend the evidence to conform to his own distorted version of reality. Here Stalin was not attempting to mislead someone else but was trying to prove his own delusion--or at least destroy the evidence that contradicted it.

None of this would have occurred if there had been a corpus delecti. Or would it have? Even with a corpse in better condition at hand, would Stalin have buried and reburied the body, as he did the remains, to cover up the evidence of Hitler's death?

What about the skull fragments? The first autopsy noted that a piece of the cranium was missing. In early 1946, a Smersh unit sent to search the area where Hitler's remains had been found discovered the fragments, and apparently they fit the skull that had been examined in Buch. We do not know when or how the skull fragments reached Moscow. We do know that they were stored in the NKVD/KGB/FBS archives and that their existence was not revealed until 1995--and then only in the West, and not in Russia until this past April! Today, just as in 1945, the skull fragments may hold the final answer. Genetic testing should be able to determine once and for all whether they are the missing pieces of Hitler's cranium. Some of Hitler's closest relatives disappeared into Stalin's Gulag, but others, including several of his closest relatives living in the United States, survived. The Russian government, however, cannot afford expensive test procedures; although it is willing to let someone else pick up the tab. So far, no one has offered to do so. In the final analysis, this lack of interest in Hitler and the end of the Third Reich, while disappointing to historians, may not be a bad thing.

Death of Hitler

During the spring of 1945, the German army was retreating from the European battlefield. The Allies, aided by British general Montgomery and American general George S. Patton, were pushing the German army back from the western occupied zones. The Russian Red Army was pushing the Germans back from the eastern occupied zone. It was now clear that Germany had lost the war and many of its soldiers were surrendering to the Allies.

Although the Allied forces' chief general Dwight D. Eisenhower was American, the Russians were given the affirmation to proceed and secure Berlin. April 30, 1945, Berlin is under heavy fire. Russian troops are blocks away from the Führer's Chancellery Bunker, an underground fortress. As fleeing German officials and Generals made their way through the ruins that was once a proud city, Russian infantrymen penetrated the city. After they secured the Chancellery Bunker, their goal was to bring the ultimate war trophy home to their leaders, Adolf Hitler. But nothing is found. Only remains that brought uncertainty and uneasiness to an otherwise successful Allied victory are suspected to be Hitler. The truth about Hitler's death intrigued the world since no official verdict or explanation can be offered.
What actually became of Hitler's body? Several theories were spread throughout 1945, after Germany's surrender, that he Soviets' found Hitler and Eva Braun's body remains after what would be thought of  as a suicide and burning. Other theories indicated that Hitler escaped Berlin. Hitler's body was not found since it was semi-cremated, falsely identified and it presented no physical evidence that could be analysed.

It was discovered not to long ago that the Soviets conducted, a year after the war, one of the most profound and thorough investigation of Hitler's death. "Operation Myth" was conducted secretly and all the findings were hidden. In the investigation, four key characters such as Hitler's valet, bodyguard, pilot and telephonist were interrogated due to their presence during the last days of Hitler's life. One of them was Otto Günsche. "Anyway, the Russians were never in a position to display the remains of Hitler's corpse, as they certainly would have done if they had taken it away as they claimed" says Otto Günsche, Hitler's personal adjutant who set his body on fire. The information the four men gave led the Russians to discover a skull with a bullet hole in it. The skull fragment was preserved but it was judged to be a long shot and never really took off. Therefore, it is most unlikely that the Russians ever found Hitler's body, as they claimed for several weeks after his death.

The Red Army initially found the body that looked like Hitler but was in fact the corpse of A Gustav Weler, Hitler's "Doppelgänger" or body look alike. This corpse had a gun shot wound to the forehead. This discovery was a confusing step in the investigation as it drew a lot of controversy. But instead of celebrating prematurely, the Russians kept this discovery quiet and pursued with more interrogating. After having interrogated and tortured more captured German staff, the Soviet counter intelligence unit found the buried remains of two corpses outside the Chancellery Bunker in the garden. The corpses were taken to a pathology lab for an autopsy. There five Soviet forensic scientists examined both corpses. They found that the male body had died of cyanide poisoning - which contradicts the theory that the captured German officers told them that Hitler shot himself through the right temple. Following these discoveries, Stalin announced that Hitler had not been found and had possibly escaped Berlin. The fact that Hitler's body had not been found created a series of beliefs that the Führer had actually escaped and fled the ruined city.

Stalin had announced to Truman during lunch in Potsdam on July 17, 1945, 78 days after his death, that Hitler had escaped. From this announcement began the phenomenon of Hitler spotting across the world. Most notably in South America. Again nothing emerged from this and no substantial evidence was delivered, thus rendering this phenomenon a wild ghost chase. Many post war magazines featured articles on Hitler still alive and hiding. Magazines such asThe Plain Truth proposed that Hitler might be in the South Pole. CBC's As it Happens broadcasted that Hitler ordered a special plane to convey all X-rays and dental records of top brass Nazis for an unknown destination. South American newspapers that have claimed to have seen him 10 years after the war ended. More and more of these articles appeared in all sorts of publications, radio and TV broadcasts around the world. But none of these allocations were built with solid evidence. They were rather wild testimonies of post war fanatics who say and hear all sorts of things to stir suspicion. No follow-ups of these were ever conducted. The only people interrogated were the men and women who were with Hitler in his last days and they gave their testimonies. Almost all captured German officers that were with Hitler during his last hour told their Russian captors that he shot himself in the right temple with a pistol and was subsequently taken outside to the garden and cremated with gasoline in the open air then buried in a shelling crater.

During a cremation in a crematorium, the heat that is reflected off the walls is so intense, that all organic matter is destroyed. But in an open air fire, much of this heat is lost therefore rendering the destruction less powerful in a crematorium. "People have said that human bodies can't be entirely consumed by fire in the open air - Baur himself, who had seen corpses burning in an aeroplane, thought not - and that a proper cremation installation is needed if there are to be no remains." Baur was Hitler's pilot. When all bodily tissues and fluids are burned away, the only thing that remains is fragile calcified bones. As a result, it is very unlikely that anything resembling a human corpse remained following Hitler's burning. Nothing that the scientific knowledge in that period could identify and prove it to be Hitler's.

Now investigators had to rely on information sources such as Harry Mengerhausen. The only person who claimed to have seen Hitler's corpse is Harry Mengershausen, a captured German who was released some time after the war. He recalled the place where the remains were buried in the garden of the Chancellory bunker. But the garden was an immense field of craters. Mr. Mengershausen spoke of a specific crater among all of the craters. Indication of a lie is obvious here. Later on, Mr. Mengerhausen said he was brought from his prison to an open pit in the woods to identify three corpses. The corpses had been identified as those of Hitler and Herr and Frau Göbbels. Mr Mengerhausen claims to have clearly recognized Hitler by the shape of the head, the distinctive shape of the nose and the missing feet. It is impossible that Mengershausen was able to detect the distinctive shape of the nose since it has burned like all the soft tissues of the body.

Once again, Mengershausen is telling a story in great detail as usual that simply does not fit the circumstances . Also it is now known fact that the Göbbels was partially burnt outside the Bunker. Their bodies were identifiable and were displayed by the Soviets and photos are available. This recognizing of the bodies was a totally unscientific procedure. Therefore, Mr. Mengerhausen's testimony to the Russians is an obvious misleading statement and unreliable source.

Following the interrogation of the captured officers, a line of doctors and physicians that worked on Hitler was brought in to answer questions. The questions were relating to Hitler's physical traits and distinctive features. However, none of them actually examined any physical evidence. None were given any corpses or bone fragments to examine. For example, a dentist that worked on Hitler's teeth was brought in to draw by memory a diagram of Hitler's teeth. Apparently the drawing matched that of the sample they found. It would have seemed unlikely that a dentist could have remembered the structure of a man's teeth without consulting some form of documentation or evidence. Memory itself is a crude method of fact gathering and completely unscientific. This would lead to the conclusion that the Russians never found his remains. Or it could also have meant that the Russians kept a series of remains and depended on the testimonies of those physicians in order to identify a possible match. But again, no concrete or solid evidence was shown. To this day, no trace or whereabouts of Adolf Hitler is known, or will it ever be. It is a true mystery. Hitler's body is unaccountable due to weakness in scientific, misleading and unreliable sources and the destruction of what little physical evidence that existed. We can therefore draw the conclusion that Hitler's remains were destroyed shortly after his death. All rumors or theories of him being still alive are also eliminated. As for the Russians having his remains, there is much doubt that at anytime during the investigation they had Hitler's remains at all or were even close to them. But are we ever going to find out what happened in that Bunker?

In many ways Adolf Hitler succeeded in his plan to destroy his body so it may not be displayed like a war trophy. And like the man himself, his death is a true mystery of horrendous and gruesome events. 

Mystery Quest – Hitler’s Escape

Adolph Hitler was one of the most vicious people in modern history. It is assumed he killed himself, but there is no evidence of his death. Near the final days of World War II when the Russians were surrounding Berlin, Hitler and his wife went down to their underground bunker and killed themselves. At least that is what his guards have said. They said they heard the shot and opened the door to find Hitler lying bloody and dead on the couch, and his wife next to him, poisoned to death.

The guards said they then took the body of Hitler outside and burned it then buried it. Apparently, Hitler did not want his lifeless body on display like Mussolini’s corpse had been.

Mystery Quest takes up the challenge of finding clues of Hitler’s death. There has been speculation that he escaped and might have gone to South America. Other people have said they had seen him around other parts of Germany. Whatever the stories, there is no evidence of a dead body belonging to Adolph Hitler.

Hitler used a double, especially after the close attempt on his life in the Valkyrie incident. What the Russians found when they arrived in Berlin, was the dead body of a man looking like Hitler, but in all accounts was his double. This man was apparently two inches shorter than Adolph Hitler.

In the Russian archived they have a couch with blood stains and a piece of a skull with a bullet hole in it. Mystery Quest sent an American archaeologist to Russia to get evidence from these items and bring it back to the United States to see if there was any DNA that could be found in the blood or the burned skull.

Hitler’s death still a mystery

Hitler’s death still a mystery

Adolf Hitler, if still alive, would be 110 years old.Did the genocidal tyrant live out his life in some remote area of the world? Or did he really die in his Berchtesgaden command post as allied soldiers stormed Berlin near the end of World War II? That question has plagued Nazi hunters since that time. But there has never been conclusive evidence of a positive identification. The European war was going badly for him and Germany was putting up its last resistance as April 1945 came in. Large headlines in The Salisbury Evening Post said such things as: “Nazis reel back on all fronts,” “Nazi cities fall like tenpins,” “Squeezing Berlin to death,” “Nazis reduced to guerrilla war,” “Nazis surrendering by the thousands.” By April 30, the headlines read: “V. E. hour may come any moment.” On Tuesday, May 1, 1945, The Post headline blared, “Hitler Is Dead.” The Hamburg radio announcement said: “Adolf Hitler was killed this afternoon in his command post at the Reich’s chancellery in Berlin. The German dictator fought up to his last breath against bolshevism. Admiral Karl Doneitz, commander of the German navy, has succeeded Hitler.” Doneitz announced: “German men and women, soldiers of the German army, our fuhrer Adolf Hitler has fallen. With deepest sorrow and reverence the German people bows. He had recognized the horrible danger of bolshevism very early and dedicated his existence to fight against it.” On May 3, the paper said: “Hitler and Goebbels both suicides. Adolf Hitler, who vowed to rule the world, committed suicide in the ruins of Berlin with propaganda minister Paul Joseph Goebbels. Whether Hitler was a suicide or whether he was a victim of a brain hemorrhage, a possibility reported by supreme headquarters, there was little doubt among Allied leaders that the Fuhrer was indeed dead and that he had met death in a manner which would thwart any die-hard Nazi attempt to build a Wagnerian legend about him. “A statement authorized by the Supreme Allied Command told of a secret meeting eight days ago at Luebeck, Germany, between Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler and Swedish Count Floke Bernadotte, reported peace go-between, at which Himmler was reported to have said, ‘Hitler is so ill he might already be dead.’ “Himmler was quoted as saying Hitler at that time could not live more than two days length. A German general named Schillenburg, who was present at the meeting, said Hitler had been stricken with a brain hemorrhage.” A May 4 announcement said: “Hitler and Goering’s remains not found in chancellery flames. “The Chancellery of the third reich in the Wilhelmstrasse has failed to yield the body of Hitler and now the building is burning,” a Red Star Dispatch from the German capital said today. The disclosure that the chancellery where Hitler had his offices was ablaze indicated that it might be difficult ever to prove that the Fuhrer committed suicide along with propaganda minister Goebbels, was the German report. “The statement that the bodies were not found in the building, however, indicated that it had been searched, and strengthened the theory that if Hitler did kill himself it was not in the chancellery.” May 7 stories said: “The greatest war in history ended today with the unconditional surrender of Germany.” A May 10 report said four bodies had been found and any one could have been Hitler. A May 23 report from Russian intelligence to the Supreme Headquarters said Hitler “died in a mercy killing. “Hitler was paralyzed and insane with pain on the last five days of his life. The Russian said a physician gave Hitler an injection of some sort that put him to sleep forever, the official declared. The Supreme Headquarters official said he had learned from another doctor that Hitler had been taking several types of injections the last few years.” A June 6 report said a body believed to be Hitler’s was found, and indicated death was brought on by poisoning. “The body, smoke-blackened and charred, was one of four discovered in the ruins of the great underground fortress beneath the new Reich chancellery after the fall of Berlin. These four bodies, any one of which answered pretty well to Hitler’s description, were removed and carefully examined by Russian army physicians. All were badly burned from the flame throwers with which the Red army soldiers finally cleared out the underground command post where Hitler and his leading Nazis made their last ditch stand. “After careful examination of teeth and other characteristics the Russians singled out one body which they believed almost certainly is that of the Nazi Fuhrer. “Asked why no official announcement of the discovery has been made by Moscow, the Russian source said that as long as any element of uncertainty exists the Russians do not wish to state definitely that Hitler’s body has been found. “It will be recalled, however, that Russian sources recently reported that Hitler died of an injection given him by his physician.” There is not much doubt Hitler had planned an escape. On June 20, a report said a huge plane had been found. “A huge four-engined plane which carried 30,000 gallons of gasoline has been found near Travemuende and German ground crews said they were ordered in the last week of the war to keep it ready to carry Hitler non-stop to Japan.” A headline on July 17 said, “Seek Hitler and Eva in Argentina.” “A spokesman said the embassy would look into the story, sent by a Chicago Times correspondent from Montevideo that the pair had reached a solitary section of the long Argentina coast by submarine and are living on a huge German-owned estate in Patagonia. It was pointed out that Argentina has given assurance to the other Allied governments that it would refuse to harbor any Axis war criminals.” The next day an AP report said, “ Hitler rumor has him in Antarctic. Tales of escape linked with Nazi U-boats at large. Adolf Hitler, variously reported dead or escaped to one place or another, was brought back in the news today by a report that he had taken up residence on an island in the Antarctic. “The broadcast said that Hitler and Eva Braun had taken refuge on Queen Maude island, a former base for German Antarctic explorers after being landed by the submarine U-530, which surrendered last week to Argentine authorities.” All the reported facts still leave one wondering what really happened to Hitler. A reporter named James Marlow wrote a column that said: “We’d better find Hitler —dead or alive — and be sure it is Hitler. If not we’ll probably have to put up with a Hitler myth for years to come.“You can see it now. Screwballs will be jumping off buildings, or under trains, or dying in flophouses after scrawling a note like this: ‘I sure fooled everybody. Adolf H.’ ”

HITLER " A Hero of German"

Adolf Hitler

Synopsis

Adolf Hitler, a charismatic, Austrian-born demagogue, rose to power in Germany during the 1920s and early 1930s at a time of social, political, and economic upheaval. Failing to take power by force in 1923, he eventually won power by democratic means. Once in power, he eliminated all opposition and launched an ambitious program of world domination and elimination of the Jews, paralleling ideas he advanced in his book, Mein Kampf. His "1,000 Year Reich" barely lasted 12 years and he died a broken and defeated man.
INSTRUCTIONAL OBJECTIVES

Students will learn:

1. Facts about Hitler's life and the historical events which occurred during that time.

2. Hitler's view of history, his theory of race, and his political goals.

3. Hitler's use of anti-Semitism to advance his career and to consolidate power.

4. How a political leader was able to manipulate the political system in a democracy and obtain autocratic power.

CHAPTER CONTENT

Hitler's Early Life

Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, the fourth child of Alois Schickelgruber and Klara Hitler in the Austrian town of Braunau. Two of his siblings died from diphtheria when they were children, and one died shortly after birth. Alois was a customs official, illegitimate by birth, who was described by his housemaid as a "very strict but comfortable" man. Young Adolf was showered with love and affection by his mother.
When Adolf was three years old, the family moved to Passau, along the Inn River on the German side of the border. A brother, Edmond, was born two years later. The family moved once more in 1895 to the farm community of Hafeld, 30 miles southwest of Linz. Another sister, Paula, was born in 1896, the sixth of the union, supplemented by a half brother and half sister from one of his father's two previous marriages.

Following another family move, Adolf lived for six months across from a large Benedictine monastery. The monastery's coat of arms' most salient feature was a swastika. As a youngster, Adolf's dream was to enter the priesthood. While there is anecdotal evidence that Adolf's father regularly beat him during his childhood, it was not unusual for discipline to be enforced in that way during that period.

By 1900, Hitler's talents as an artist surfaced. He did well enough in school to be eligible for either the university preparatory "gymnasium" or the technical/scientific Realschule. Because the latter had a course in drawing, Adolf accepted his father's decision to enroll him in the Realschule. He did not do well there.

Adolf's father died in 1903 after suffering a pleural hemorrhage. Adolf himself suffered from lung infections, and he quit school at the age of 16, partially the result of ill health and partially the result of poor school work.

In 1906, Adolf was permitted to visit Vienna, but he was unable to gain admission to a prestigious art school. His mother developed terminal breast cancer and was treated by Dr. Edward Bloch, a Jewish doctor who served the poor. After an operation and excruciatingly painful and expensive treatments with a dangerous drug, she died on December 21, 1907.

Hitler spent six years in Vienna, living on a small legacy from his father and an orphan's pension. Virtually penniless by 1909, he wandered Vienna as a transient, sleeping in bars, flophouses, and shelters for the homeless, including, ironically, those financed by Jewish philanthropists. It was during this period that he developed his prejudices about Jews, his interest in politics, and debating skills. According to John Toland's biography, Adolf Hitler, two of his closest friends at this time were Jewish, and he admired Jewish art dealers and Jewish operatic performers and producers. However, Vienna was a center of anti-Semitism, and the media's portrayal of Jews as scapegoats with stereotyped attributes did not escape Hitler's fascination.

In May 1913, Hitler, seeking to avoid military service, left Vienna for Munich, the capital of Bavaria, following a windfall received from an aunt who was dying. In January, the police came to his door bearing a draft notice from the Austrian government. The document threatened a year in prison and a fine if he was found guilty of leaving his native land with the intent of evading conscription. Hitler was arrested on the spot and taken to the Austrian Consulate. Upon reporting to Salzburg for duty, he was found "unfit...too weak...and unable to bear arms."

Hitler's World War I Service

When World War I was touched off by the assassination by a Serb of the heir to the Austrian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Hitler's passions against foreigners, particularly Slavs, were inflamed. He was caught up in the patriotism of the time, and submitted a petition to enlist in the Bavarian army.
After less than two months of training, Hitler's regiment saw its first combat near Ypres, against the British and Belgians. Hitler narrowly escaped death in battle several times, and was eventually awarded two Iron Crosses for bravery. He rose to the rank of lance corporal but no further. In October 1916, he was wounded by an enemy shell and evacuated to a Berlin area hospital. After recovering, and serving a total of four years in the trenches, he was temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack in Belgium in October 1918.

Communist-inspired insurrections shook Germany while Hitler was recovering from his injuries. Some Jews were leaders of these abortive revolutions, and this inspired hatred of Jews as well as Communists. On November 9th, the Kaiser abdicated and the Socialists gained control of the government. Anarchy was more the rule in the cities.

Free Corps

The Free Corps was a paramilitary organization composed of vigilante war veterans who banded together to fight the growing Communist insurgency which was taking over Germany. The Free Corps crushed this insurgency. Its members formed the nucleus of the Nazi "brown-shirts" (S.A.) which served as the Nazi party's army.
Weimar Republic

With the loss of the war, the German monarchy came to an end and a republic was proclaimed. A constitution was written providing for a President with broad political and military power and a parliamentary democracy. A national election was held to elect 423 deputies to the National Assembly. The centrist parties swept to victory. The result was what is known as the Weimar Republic. On June 28, 1919, the German government ratified the Treaty of Versailles. Under the terms of the treaty which ended hostilities in the War, Germany had to pay reparations for all civilian damages caused by the war. Germany also lost her colonies and large portions of German territory. A 30-mile strip on the right bank of the Rhine was demilitarized. Limits were placed on German armaments and military strength. The terms of the treaty were humiliating to most Germans, and condemnation of its terms undermined the government and served as a rallying cry for those who like Hitler believed Germany was ultimately destined for greatness.
German Worker's Party

Soon after the war, Hitler was recruited to join a military intelligence unit, and was assigned to keep tabs on the German Worker's Party. At the time, it was comprised of only a handful of members. It was disorganized and had no program, but its members expressed a right-wing doctrine consonant with Hitler's. He saw this party as a vehicle to reach his political ends. His blossoming hatred of the Jews became part of the organization's political platform. Hitler built up the party, converting it from a de facto discussion group to an actual political party. Advertising for the party's meetings appeared in anti-Semitic newspapers. The turning point of Hitler's mesmerizing oratorical career occurred at one such meeting held on October 16, 1919. Hitler's emotional delivery of an impromptu speech captivated his audience. Through word of mouth, donations poured into the party's coffers, and subsequent mass meetings attracted hundreds of Germans eager to hear the young, forceful and hypnotic leader.
With the assistance of party staff, Hitler drafted a party program consisting of twenty-five points. This platform was presented at a public meeting on February 24, 1920, with over 2,000 eager participants. After hecklers were forcibly removed by Hitler supporters armed with rubber truncheons and whips, Hitler electrified the audience with his masterful demagoguery. Jews were the principal target of his diatribe. Among the 25 points were revoking the Versailles Treaty, confiscating war profits, expropriating land without compensation for use by the state, revoking civil rights for Jews, and expelling those Jews who had emigrated into Germany after the war began.

The following day, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were published in the local anti-Semitic newspaper. The false, but alarming accusations reinforced Hitler's anti-Semitism. Soon after, treatment of the Jews was a major theme of Hitler's orations, and the increasing scapegoating of the Jews for inflation, political instability, unemployment, and the humiliation in the war, found a willing audience. Jews were tied to "internationalism" by Hitler. The name of the party was changed to the National Socialist German Worker's party, and the red flag with the swastika was adopted as the party symbol. A local newspaper which appealed to anti-Semites was on the verge of bankruptcy, and Hitler raised funds to purchase it for the party.

In January 1923, French and Belgian troops marched into Germany to settle a reparations dispute. Germans resented this occupation, which also had an adverse effect on the economy. Hitler's party benefited by the reaction to this development, and exploited it by holding mass protest rallies despite a ban on such rallies by the local police.

The Nazi party began drawing thousands of new members, many of whom were victims of hyper-inflation and found comfort in blaming the Jews for this trouble. The price of an egg, for example, had inflated to 30 million times its original price in just 10 years. Economic upheaval generally breeds political upheaval, and Germany in the 1920s was no exception.

The Munich Putsch

The Bavarian government defied the Weimar Republic, accusing it of being too far left. Hitler endorsed the fall of the Weimar Republic, and declared at a public rally on October 30, 1923 that he was prepared to march on Berlin to rid the government of the Communists and the Jews. On November 8, 1923, Hitler held a rally at a Munich beer hall and proclaimed a revolution. The following day, he led 2,000 armed "brown-shirts" in an attempt to take over the Bavarian government. This putsch was resisted and put down by the police, after more than a dozen were killed in the fighting. Hitler suffered a broken and dislocated arm in the melee, was arrested, and was imprisoned at Landsberg. He received a five-year sentence.
Mein Kampf

Hitler served only nine months of his five-year term. While in prison, he wrote the first volume of Mein Kampf. It was partly an autobiographical book (although filled with glorified inaccuracies, self-serving half-truths and outright revisionism) which also detailed his views on the future of the German people. There were several targets of the vicious diatribes in the book, such as democrats, Communists, and internationalists. But he reserved the brunt of his vituperation for the Jews, whom he portrayed as responsible for all of the problems and evils of the world, particularly democracy, Communism, and internationalism, as well as Germany's defeat in the War. Jews were the German nation's true enemy, he wrote. They had no culture of their own, he asserted, but perverted existing cultures such as Germany's with their parasitism. As such, they were not a race, but an anti-race.
"[The Jews'] ultimate goal is the denaturalization, the promiscuous bastardization of other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of the highest peoples as well as the domination of his racial mishmash through the extirpation of the folkish intelligentsia and its replacement by the members of his own people," he wrote. On the contrary, the German people were of the highest racial purity and those destined to be the master race according to Hitler. To maintain that purity, it was necessary to avoid intermarriage with subhuman races such as Jews and Slavs.

Germany could stop the Jews from conquering the world only by eliminating them. By doing so, Germany could also find Lebensraum, living space, without which the superior German culture would decay. This living space, Hitler continued, would come from conquering Russia (which was under the control of Jewish Marxists, he believed) and the Slavic countries. This empire would be launched after democracy was eliminated and a "FÅhrer" called upon to rebuild the German Reich.

A second volume of Mein Kampf was published in 1927. It included a history of the Nazi party to that time and its program, as well as a primer on how to obtain and retain political power, how to use propaganda and terrorism, and how to build a political organization.

While Mein Kampf was crudely written and filled with embarrassing tangents and ramblings, it struck a responsive chord among its target those Germans who believed it was their destiny to dominate the world. The book sold over five million copies by the start of World War II.

Hitler's Rise to Power

Once released from prison, Hitler decided to seize power constitutionally rather than by force of arms. Using demagogic oratory, Hitler spoke to scores of mass audiences, calling for the German people to resist the yoke of Jews and Communists, and to create a new empire which would rule the world for 1,000 years.
Hitler's Nazi party captured 18% of the popular vote in the 1930 elections. In 1932, Hitler ran for President and won 30% of the vote, forcing the eventual victor, Paul von Hindenburg, into a runoff election. A political deal was made to make Hitler chancellor in exchange for his political support. He was appointed to that office in January 1933.

Upon the death of Hindenburg in August 1934, Hitler was the consensus successor. With an improving economy, Hitler claimed credit and consolidated his position as a dictator, having succeeded in eliminating challenges from other political parties and government institutions. The German industrial machine was built up in preparation for war. By 1937, he was comfortable enough to put his master plan, as outlined in Mein Kampf, into effect. Calling his top military aides together at the "FÅhrer Conference" in November 1937, he outlined his plans for world domination. Those who objected to the plan were dismissed.

Hitler Launches the War

Hitler ordered the annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938. Hitler's army invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, sparking France and England to declare war on Germany. A Blitzkrieg (lightning war) of German tanks and infantry swept through most of Western Europe as nation after nation fell to the German war machine.
In 1941, Hitler ignored a non-aggression pact he had signed with the Soviet Union in August 1939. Several early victories after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, were reversed with crushing defeats at Moscow (December 1941) and Stalingrad (winter, 1942-43). The United States entered the war in December 1941. By 1944, the Allies invaded occupied Europe at Normandy Beach on the French coast, German cities were being destroyed by bombing, and Italy, Germany's major ally under the leadership of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, had fallen.

Hitler's Last Days

Several attempts were made on Hitler's life during the war, but none was successful. As the war appeared to be inevitably lost and his hand-picked lieutenants, seeing the futility, defied his orders, he killed himself on April 30, 1945. His long-term mistress and new bride, Eva Braun, joined him in suicide. By that time, one of his chief objectives was achieved with the annihilation of two-thirds of European Jewry.
VOCABULARY

Anarchy - The absence of government or law in a society.

Demagogue - A person who gains power through impassioned public appeals to the emotions and prejudices of a group by speaking or writing. Free Corps - A paramilitary organization of German World War I veterans who organized to oppose Communist insurgency.

Fuhrer - A leader, especially one exercising the absolute power of a tyrant. Hitler's title as leader of the Nazi party, and Chief of the German state.

Imperialism - A foreign policy which includes the taking of territory by force or coercion.

Lebensraum (Living Space) - A German term indicating the Germans' imperialistic designs on Europe. It also refers to the additional territory deemed necessary to the nation for its economic well-being.

Mein Kampf - "My Struggle" in German. A book written by Hitler while in prison which became the standard work of Nazi political doctrine.

Nazism - The abbreviation for National Socialist German Worker's Party. The fascist dictatorship under Adolf Hitler in Germany from 1933-1945.

Paramilitary - Describing an organization which operates in the style of an army, but in an unofficial capacity, and often in secret, such as the S.A. Putsch - A revolt or uprising.

Reparations - Payments made by a defeated country to the victors to make amends for losses suffered.

S.A. - The Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers), also known as the "brown-shirts." It was the Nazi paramilitary arm under the command of Ernst Rîhm. It was active in the Nazi battle for the streets against members of other German political parties and was notorious for its violent and terroristic methods.

Swastika - An ancient symbol in the form of a twisted cross which was adopted by the Nazi party as its logo in the 1920s.

Third Reich - The Third Empire. It refers to Hitler's name for his German Empire as a successor to the 1st Empire of the Roman Emperors (First Reich) and the Empire of Bismarck in 19th century Germany (Second Reich).

Weimar Republic - The German democratic government from 1919-1934 formed after Germany's defeat in World War I. Its capital was located in Berlin.