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FABRICATING THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER FABRICATING DEATH THE ADOLF HITLER The little that most of us think we know about the circumstances of Hitler's demise comes to us courtesy of British MI6 agent Hugh Trevor-Roper, and there are many reasons why we shouldn't believe the "bunker bunk". Part 1 of 3 any people are broadly familiar with the official narrative of Adolf Hitler's "last days", which was revisited on our cinema screens only recently in the form of the German film Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004). What they do not know is that the official narrative is a political fiction—and that the revulsion it inspires is the result of deliberate planning. As the war reached its dreadful conclusion, Churchill and the British government set out to ensure that history never repeated itself—that there would be no resurgence of German nationalism—by dictating how history would view the ultra-nationalistic Third Reich down to the very last detail. The narrative was to be so unedifying as to permanently tarnish the regime's prestige in the eyes of even its most ardent supporters. Af no stage was historical truth a consideration. Neither the British nor the Americans showed genuine interest in Hitler's fate. Their only interest lay in assigning to the movement's leader the most ignoble exit from the historical stage as possible. In this sense, the consignment of Hitler's charred corpse to a rubbish-strewn bomb crater functioned as a metaphor for the consignment of the Hitler regime itself to the dustbin of history. In the foreword to Hitler's Death (2005), an anthology of documents from the Russian state archives designed to buttress the official narrative of the German leader's fate, historian Andrew Roberts avers: "Part of the reason why Germany has been such a successful, pacific, liberal democracy for the past sixty years is precisely because of the way that Hitler met his end in the manner described in mesmerising detail in this book. Germany needed Year Zero in order to be reborn."' Few people stop to consider the sheer unlikeliness of the Germans making the Allies such a fine farewell present as a narrative of Hitler's demise that would serve the Allies' postwar agenda perfectly. In fact, Hitler's Death offers a considerable amount of evidence inviting the opposite conclusion to that peddled by Roberts. When the documents presented in this volume are examined in chronological order and correlated with other contemporary sources such as news reports, they show that the Soviet investigation of Hitler's death encountered major obstacles virtually as soon as it began. In this article series, I tell the story of the abortive Soviet investigation and show how Stalin's failure to be taken in by planted evidence and bogus witnesses forced the British to take the initiative. Working in tandem with the Americans, the British built a veritable house of cards on the testimony of Hitler's chauffeur, Erich Kempka, despite the fact that he was almost certainly not even in Berlin during the closing days of the Third Reich. As I tell the story, I disclose a considerable amount of evidence—most of it almost entirely overlooked—that supports the theory first outlined in Hugh Thomas's pathbreaking 1996 book The Murder of Adolf Hitler, to the effect that the Germans concealed Hitler's exit from history in a well-thought-out forensic fraud. Thomas may not be right about how the Germans pulled it off, but there can be no doubt the German regime succeeded in both obfuscating the true circumstances of Hitler's demise and ensuring that Hitler's corpse never fell into the hands of his enemies. The paucity of evidence Without bodily remains, it is impossible to affirm that a person is dead, let alone determine the manner in which he or she died. At least officially, there is no Hitler corpse because in 1970, so the Soviets/Russians maintain, the presumptive Hitler remains were macerated and intermixed with the remains of 10 other persons—allegedly Hitler's wife NEXUS = 37 Introduction: Debunking the bunker legend by Giordan Smith © 2007 Email: giordansmith@gmail.com OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2007 www.nexusmagazine.com