Moscow Display on Hitler May End Mystery

It’s only 5 inches across and looks like a tattered piece of leather from a grimy, oversize softball. In a cluttered backyard, it would be easily overlooked.

Which, in fact, it was, according to archival evidence that went on display this week in Moscow.

The object now sitting on black velvet under glass at Russia’s State Archives is believed to be almost all that remains of the skull of the man many consider the 20th century’s most evil person: Adolf Hitler.

The leader of the Third Reich committed suicide April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops seized Berlin and closed in on his chancellery, where he was holed up in an underground bunker. Ever since, the fate of his corpse has been one of the war’s enduring mysteries.

Russia announced in 1993 that it had the skull fragment and said the rest of Hitler’s remains had been destroyed. In the last few years, scholars working with Russian archivists have gradually pieced together most of the story, at least as told by the Russian secret police and their documents.

But never before had Russian officials gathered together and displayed what they know about the death of the Fuehrer and his regime.

“This exhibition at long last puts an end to all conjectures about Hitler’s death,” said Lev Bezymensky, a historian and expert on the Third Reich. “The facts which were in the past known only to a small circle of experts are now presented to the entire world.”

The exhibit, titled “The Agony of the Third Reich--Retribution,” brings together materials from more than half a dozen different Russian archives, including that of the secret police, now known as the Federal Security Service. Some of the documents on display were only recently declassified.

It also for the first time displays objects recovered from the bunker and long held by the secret police: a gold cigarette case discolored by fire, a kit for testing air quality, fragments of a blood-stained couch from Hitler’s study.

“What’s new is that we can finally see these relics instead of just hearing about them,” said Kathleen Smith, Moscow representative of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

Officially, the exhibit marks Russia’s Victory Day on May 9, the day in 1945 that Josef Stalin announced that the Nazis had surrendered. It includes materials chronicling the army’s entry into Germany and continuing through the Nuremberg trials.

But Hitler’s death and the fate of his remains take up the bulk of the exhibition. And the skull fragment is the centerpiece.

The Soviets and the Russians have long feared that Hitler’s remains could become objects of veneration by neo-Nazis. But the scrap of bone on display is hardly inspiring--small, with jagged edges, signs of charring and an obvious bullet hole. The Russians also have four fragments of Hitler’s jaw, whose dental work was used to make the identification--the exhibit, however, includes only photos because the actual items are considered too fragile to display.

Following Hitler’s wishes, two assistants burned his remains and buried them in a shallow grave near the rear entrance to the bunker. The remains of Eva Braun--Hitler’s longtime mistress whom he married the day before and who also committed suicide--were burned and buried along with him.

Soviet troops discovered the grave May 4, 1945. An autopsy noted that the top of the skull was missing and determined that Hitler had died of cyanide poisoning. He was positively identified by comparing his dental work to drawings made by his dentist and various assistants.

Sergei Mironenko, director of Russia’s State Archives, says Hitler used two suicide methods simultaneously--taking a capsule of cyanide and shooting himself in the mouth. The bullet exited through his right temple and, as is common in such suicides, the skull cracked around the exit wound, he said.

More than a year later, a second Soviet search and investigation uncovered two skull fragments, which fit together, in the crater where Hitler and Braun had been buried. The pieces of skull are believed to have fallen off the corpse as it was removed from the grave, and they lay in the cluttered yard unnoticed until the second investigation. The skull fragments were brought to Moscow for analysis and safekeeping.

Meanwhile, the Soviets had buried the rest of Hitler in an unmarked grave at a top-secret Soviet military facility in Magdeburg. There he would lie for a quarter of a century, until the Soviets turned the facility over to their East German allies in 1970.

Still worried about Hitler veneration, KGB chief Yuri V. Andropov ordered the remains exhumed and destroyed before the Soviets vacated the base. According to documents in the exhibit, the remains were dug up secretly at night, cremated and the ashes dumped in a nearby river. The skull and jaw fragments held in Moscow were all that remained.

The archivists have not had the funds to conduct DNA tests on the skull and jaw fragments but are hoping that interested parties in Germany or the West will offer to foot the bill. But for their part, they have no doubt about the bones’ provenance and identity.

“We haven’t found a single document that expresses any doubt about the identity of the bodies,” Mironenko said.

The exhibit is unlikely to put to rest all questions about Hitler’s fate, especially among those who distrust materials from Soviet archives. And its sheer gruesomeness is unlikely to make it a popular tourist stop.

Indeed, instead of neo-Nazi skinheads, the only visitors Thursday were middle-age archivists and elderly war veterans. One of them was 77-year-old Yelena Konyus, who said the exhibit didn’t impress her much one way or the other.

“As the saying goes, there’s no sense shaking your fist after the fight is over,” she said. “It’s all history now. And Hitler got his punishment.”

And maybe just a bit more. Among the documents in the exhibit is part of a transcript of an interrogation with Hitler’s adjutant, Otto Guensche, in which Hitler expresses fears of what will happen to his body.

“I want my remains cremated after my death,” he quotes Hitler as saying, “because I don’t ever want to be placed on exhibit in some museum.”

It may have taken 55 years, but Russia has just denied Hitler his final wish.