Long-winded disposal of totalitarian toxic waste
The Death of Hitler
Hodder & Stoughton,£25 Reviewed by Robert Low
THERE REALLY wasn’t much of a mystery about how Hitler died: on April the 30th 1945, he shot himself in the head in the Berlin bunker complex as the Red Army closed in. Eva Braun, whom he had married the previous day, took a cyanide pill. Soldiers dragged their bodies outside and tried to cremate them as the bullets whistled around them. It was, inevitably, a botched job.
When the Soviet forces overran the bunkers and discovered the charred corpses, interrogations of Hitler’s surviving entourage swiftly uncovered what had happened. But the Soviets bungled the first post-mortem, implying that Hitler, too, might have taken cyanide, and it suited Stalin to cover up what had happened, leaving the possibility that Hitler had escaped. As long as he might be at large, it strengthened the hand of the Communists.
So rumours spread. Perhaps he had escaped to South America by submarine? (Years later, jokes on that theme still abounded: one had Hitler in the Brazilian jungle, vowing: “Next time, no more Mr Nice Guy.”)
Exasperated by Stalin’s obfuscation, towards the end of 1945 the British occupation authorities commissioned a young intelligence officer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, to investigate. He established the truth, revealed to the wider public in 1947 in his classic The Last Days of Hitler.
Meanwhile, the Soviets buried the bodies near Rathenow, deep in the Soviet zone. In 1970, they were exhumed and destroyed on the orders of Yuri Andropov, KGB head and later Soviet leader.
To complete the cover-up, most of the German witnesses were taken away War correspondents in 1945 being shown Hitler’s alleged burial place in Berlin
to Soviet prisons: it would be decades before they returned to Germany and told their stories in books like I was Hitler’s Pilot. The film, Downfall, based on such accounts, gives an accurate picture of Hitler’s final days.
So what’s left? Plenty, according to Jean-Christophe Brisard, a French journalist
and documentary-maker. After the collapse of Communism, the Soviet archives were thrown open, revealing a wealth of documents, such as interrogation transcripts, and what was said to be Hitler’s skull and teeth. Brisard and his co-author Lana Parshina, a Russian-American researcher, set themselves the task of completing the story. Their summary of historical events is fine, if well-known by now. Unfortunately, the account of their struggles with the Russian authorities, who have reverted to the obstructionism of the Soviet era, takes up far too much space and is wildly over-written. Brisard, who did the writing, could construct a chapter out of buying a baguette from the local boulangerie.
There is one interesting section, describing the examination of the skull and teeth by a French forensic scientist, Dr Philippe Charlier, using a state-of-the-art binocular miscroscope.
Charlier is as cool as Brisard is excitable. Back in Paris, his conclusion is that he can’t be certain it’s Hitler’s skull but they’re definitely his teeth. So that’s one mystery cleared up. A bigger one is why Hodder & Stoughton didn’t take an axe to Brisard’s overblown prose.
Robert Low is consultant editor of Standpoint magazine.