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FABRICATING THE DEATH OF ADOLF HITLER FABRICATING DEATH THE ADOLF HITLER The Hitler suicide story was used by the British as a weapon of psychological warfare to discredit National Socialism and stifle the German people's will to resist foreign occupation. Part 3 of 3 he evidence I have discussed so far establishes that, during the last days of the Third Reich, multiple cremations were carried out in the Reich Chancellery grounds in front of sundry witnesses who had been persuaded to believe that the bodies they saw being cremated were those of Adolf and Eva Hitler. It would also appear that Heusemann and Echtmann, the two dental workers associated with Hitler's dentist, Professor Blaschke, deceived themselves into thinking that they possessed sufficient expertise to identify the human remains recovered by the Soviets as those of Adolf and Eva Hitler. The progress of the Soviet investigation was so rapid, however, that it had begun to fall apart even before the problems with Heusemann's and Echtmann's evidence could have been detected. The Soviets’ problems began on 8 May—the day the autopsy of the putative Hitler remains was carried out—when a "bullet-torn and battered body of a man identified as Hitler" was found in the ruins of the bunker.’ An American war correspondent, Joseph ("Joe") W. Grigg, Jr, proudly announced from Berlin that Hitler's body had almost certainly been found. Grigg was soon forced to retract his scoop, however. On 10 May, he reported that "[flour bodies, blackened and charred, that seem to answer to Hitler's general appearance have been dragged out of the [Chancellery] ruins". He observed that "none has been identified as being definitely that of the Nazi Fuehrer". Considering that within five days they had found six corpses, any one of which could have been Hitler's, Grigg's conclusion was appropriately pessimistic: "...the Russians are beginning to believe that no body that can be identified without any shadow of doubt as that of Adolf Hitler ever will be found now"? It is no small indication of the difficulties the Soviets experienced that, within a month of being discovered, the corpses initially taken to be those of Hitler and his wife had been buried, unburied and reburied no less than three times. They were first buried at an undisclosed location near Berlin, then exhumed and moved to Finov in the Soviet Union, and then exhumed and reburied in Rathenau, Germany, on 3 June 1945. Nor did their travels end there. A month later, they were taken to Friedrichshagen, Germany, where one of Hitler's bodyguards, Harry Mengershausen, was asked to look at them for identification purposes. It would be hard to account for this macabre travelling show if the Soviets were sure that the bodies they had found were really those of the Hitler couple. In early June, the substantial scale of the hoax became apparent when it was revealed that the bunker had been littered with bodies of numerous individuals dressed in Hitler's trousers. On 9 June, during a press conference attended by British, American, French and Russian reporters, the Soviet military commander Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov admitted that they had "found no corpses which could be Hitler's". The Soviet commandant of Berlin, Colonel-General Nikolai E. Bezarin, explained that the Russians had "...found several bodies in Hitler's Reich Chancellery with the Fuehrer's name on their clothes... In Hitler's Chancellery we found, in fact, too many bodies with his name on the clothes. It got to be a joke. Every time I would find a pair of pants I would say, 'These are Hitler's'." Zhukov told the reporters that he now considered it a serious possibility that Hitler had escaped Berlin by air. "He could have taken off at the very last moment, for there was an airfield at his disposal," he said. Strikingly, one of the planted corpses could have belonged to Hitler's arch-enemy, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the duplicitous head of the Abwehr (German military intelligence) who was tried and sentenced to death for complicity in the 20 July 1944 assassination plot. In December 1950, Canaris's adjutant, Willy Jenke, told British author NEXUS * 35 The Soviets’ futile search for the real Hitler corpse by Giordan Smith © 2007 Email: giordansmith@gmail.com FEBRUARY — MARCH 2008 www.nexusmagazine.com