Hitler's skull? It's female...

[Jan Klimkowski]

Yelena Rzhevskaya, the interpreter with the Smersh group, later recounted how on the evening of May 8, when Soviet troops prepared to celebrate the German surrender, she was given a box covered in red satin and told to guard it with her life. She described it as “the sort used for cheap jewelry.” The box held Hitler’s jaws. Rzhevskaya was given it because, as a woman, she was considered less likely to get drunk that night and lose it.

The skull and the jaws are still separate because Smersh hung on to its precious evidence. The cranium, recovered later, allegedly at the same site, was taken by the N.K.V.D., and that is why it has been in the State Archive of the Russian Federation since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The jaws are almost certainly still held in the Lubyanka, the Moscow headquarters of the Russian secret police, along with other prizes retrieved by Smersh from the garden, like Hitler’s Nazi party badge, which was taken from the body of Magda Goebbels.

Although we have been subjected over the last few months to a barrage of disinformation from the Russians about the start of World War II — including attempts to blame the Poles and the British for its outbreak — I would tend to believe their version in the case of its ending. Even if the cranium is not Hitler’s but some unknown woman’s, the jaws are almost certainly genuine. The Russians could end speculation and ridiculous conspiracy theories by allowing an international team to carry out DNA tests on them.

In any case, Stalin was obsessed with every detail about his archenemy Hitler, whom he both feared and admired in a distorted way. The investigations of his death were meticulous, as the Smersh reports show. Witnesses to the suicide and the burning of the bodies were interviewed again and again by Smersh and the N.K.V.D., and some by the British — in fact, by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who wrote “The Last Days of Hitler.”

There were no major discrepancies in any of the accounts, so suggestions that Hitler did not commit suicide and had escaped from Berlin represent nothing but gratuitous sensationalism. It is just another attempt to exploit the nightmare conspiracy theory that the source of unparalleled evil lived on somewhere, in secret.

Beevor's official anti-"conspiracy theory" version is convoluted and hysterical. Indeed, it is itself a "conspiracy theory" to explain away a very simple fact: the supposed skull of Hitler is actually a woman's.

It is highly unlikely that we will ever know for sure whether Hitler was one of the numerous top Nazis who escaped, mostly to South America, either via Paperclip/Vatican ratlines or Nazi plane & submarine.

Those are the obvious escape routes. I very much doubt that Hitler would have been spirited to the USSR by the NKVD and hidden. Or given a new role by the West like Gehlen - the other major alternatives.

Part of me suspects that Stalin would have relished a very public blood revenge against Hitler. Brutal events often need brutal and highly symbolic climaxes.

The British royals, once restored to power, stuck Oliver Cromwell's head on a pole and displayed it at the heart of London. In the age of the moving image, Nicolae Ceauşescu had to be shot on video tape to provide proof of the death of the Romanian Vampyre.

It is suspicious that Hitler never received a public and symbolic execution.

Against that, it is entirely possible that Hitler did die in Nazi Germany. However, it is then not unreasonable to ask those who claim that he did perish in Berlin to provide proper forensic evidence to support their argument.

A woman's skull just doesn't cut it.....