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eyes. The six most important accounts are those of SS- the exit door from the bunker; (2) the male body was wearing black Obersturmbannfuehrer Harry Mengershausen, SS- trousers, shoes and socks like those Hitler usually wore; (3) at the Sturmbannfuehrer Otto Guensche, SS-Obergruppenfuehrer same time, a female body was carried out of the bunker whose face Johannes ("Hans") Rattenhuber, SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Erich was uncovered and was readily identifiable as Eva Hitler; (4) Heinz Kempka, SS-Unterfuehrer Hermann Karnau and SS- Linge carried the body of the male; and (5) the two bodies were laid Hauptscharfuehrer Erich Mansfeld. down on the ground beside each other, doused with petrol, The first three eyewitnesses, Mengershausen, Guensche and cremated and buried together in a bomb crater or ditch situated a Rattenhuber, all fell into Soviet hands after Berlin was captured on __ very short distance from the bunker exit door. As soon as we look 2 May 1945. They recounted their respective versions of Hitler's at elements of the story other than those listed above, discrepancies fate to Soviet authorities between 13 and 20 May 1945. The three _ prove to be the rule. If they had been referring to the same event, men's accounts were not available to the public until the 2005 authentic accounts ought to have agreed on most details as fully as publication of the anthology Hitler's Death. Although Hitler's _ they agreed on the aforementioned five points. valet, SS-Sturmbannfuehrer Heinz Linge, was captured at the same It is impossible to distinguish between eyewitnesses who were time, his interrogation statements are not included in Hitler's Death “telling the truth" and eyewitnesses who were lying. In the absence and, so far as I know, have never been made public. Given that of material or documentary evidence that would serve as a control, Linge subsequently emerged as one of the central protagonists in any such distinction is untenable. Indeed, each eyewitness account the official story of Hitler's demise, this fact obviously raises is as credible as any of the others. questions about the pretensions of Hitler's Death to constitute The approach that has most widely been followed, therefore, is virtually the last word on the subject. that taken by Trevor-Roper, which simply involved assimilating all The three accounts can be supplemented by various other the available accounts into a narrative of a single event and ignoring accounts given by German prisoners to the Soviets in May 1945,in or explaining away the details that did not fit with it. By this particular that given on 7 May by SS-Sturmbannfuehrer Dr Helmut —_ means, to give just one example, Trevor-Roper accepted an account Kunz. Although Dr Kunz did not profess to know anything of events which the eyewitness Erich Mansfeld stated had taken pertaining directly to the deaths of Adolf and Eva Hitler, his place "not later than the 27th of April" but treated it as if it were a statement contains a highly significant account of Eva's last known description of an event that a different eyewitness, Erich Kempka, conversation. claimed to have observed on 30 April 1945.’ The other three eyewitnesses, Kempka, Karnau and Mansfeld, The shortcomings of Trevor-Roper's homogenisation technique were interrogated by the Americans and the British. Until Hug are rather obvious, however. If one accepts the overall reliability of Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler was published in 1947,‘ the Mansfeld's account to the extent that one is willing to make use of accounts of Kempka and Karnau were the only ones available to the — the information it contains, by what right does one ignore general public. The other four accounts have subsequently become = Mansfeld's statement that he is "positive" that the events he was available, three as recently as 2005. This means that it is possible describing had taken place "not later than" 27 April? only now to consider the six earliest eyewitness statements together Trevor-Roper did the same with the eyewitness testimony of as an independent body of evidence. Only now is it possible, in Hermann Karnau, who stated that the events he had observed had effect, to leave The Last Days of Hitler behind and concern _ taken place on | May. Clearly, one cannot simply cherry-pick the ourselves with the best available original source material. evidence in this way. Yet it is by this very method that Trevor- Strikingly, the information derived from these six individuals Roper assembled the grand narrative of the fall of the Third Reich represents the bulk of the firsthand evidence that would ever which is accepted by most people, including most historians, as become available. Only two of the persons specifically named by essentially correct! others as having been involved in the final 7 days—Heinz Linge and Reichsjugendleiter Artur Axmann—survived the war and were able to give their own accounts later. However, in both cases, the eyewitnesses appear to have been pressured to conform their testimony to the Trevor-Roper account, which was treated by the Anglo-American establishment from the very beginning as definitive. None of the other individuals identified in the six earliest accounts as having been involved—Jansen, Kruge, Lindloff, Medle, Schaedle, Burgdorf, Krebs, Bormann, Goebbels—survived the war (so far as we know). We therefore find ourselves saddled with the task of trying to make sense of one of modern history's most important events on the basis of a remarkably thin body of evidence. The six accounts describe similar events. If we compare them, we find that there is general agreement on the following five ; ; ~ points: (1) a male body was carried from a Photo taken in 1946, showing the exit from the Fuehrerbunker. room in the bunker to a location just outside The wooden guard tower was added by the Soviets in early July 1945. Photo taken in 1946, showing the exit from the Fuehrerbunker. The wooden guard tower was added by the Soviets in early July 1945. NEXUS = 39 OCTOBER — NOVEMBER 2007 www.nexusmagazine.com