Hitler. 1936-1945: Nemesis

156. Amtsgericht Laufen, Verfahren des Amtsgerichts Berchtesgaden zur Todeserklärung bzw. Feststellung der Todeszeit von Adolf Hitler, testimony of Otto Günsche, 19–21 June 1956, Bl.5–6, 8–9; testimony of Heinz Linge, 8–10 February 1956, Bl.5–8; Joachimsthaler, 230, 232. The meticulous study of the testimony and forensic evidence by Joachimsthaler, 229–73, dispels doubt about the manner of death. The earliest accounts emanating from the bunker were that Hitler had shot himself and Eva Braun had taken poison. Below (who had left before the suicides) heard this as early as 6 May related by one of the guards attached to the bunker (PRO, London, WO2.08/3781, Fol.5, interrogation of Nicolaus von Below, n.d. (but covering letter is of 22 June 1946)). Hugh Trevor-Roper was given the same information by Erich Kempka and Artur Axmann, who saw the bodies in situ, as well as by Martin Bormann’s secretary Else Krüger. (PRO, WO208/3790, Fol.54 (Trevor-Roper’s handwritten note, on a chronology of events during the last days in the bunker).) The key witnesses give no indication that a shot was heard — counter to some of the unreliable stories (e.g. Michael A. Musmanno Collection, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, interview with Gertraud Junge, 7 February 1948, FF25, Fol.48; IfZ, ED 100, Irving-Sammlung, Traudl Junge Memoirs, Fol.159; Galante, 21, testimony of Junge). The intentionally misleading account of Hitler’s death by cyanide poisoning put about by Soviet historians — see, especially, Lev Bezymenski, The Death of Adolf Hitler. Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives, London, 1968, can be dismissed. Equally redundant are the findings of Petrova and Watson, The Death of Hitler. The earliest suggestion that Hitler had poisoned, not shot, himself appears to have come from the reported testimony from around an hour after the shooting by Sergeant Fritz Tornow, who had helped poison Hitler’s alsatian, and said he had detected a similar odour in the room after the suicides (though he had not been in the room before the removal of the bodies) (PRO, London, WO208/3790, Fol.128 (where he is named Tornoff), testimony of Willi Otto Müller, 4 February 1946). Hitler’s pilot, Hans Baur, claimed on release from prison in Moscow in 1949 that Hitler had taken poison, then shot himself through the head. But Baur was not present at the time of the deaths, and his evidence is in any case unreliable in several respects. (See Joachimsthaler, 225, 260.) Artur Axmann, who had seen the bodies, also testified on 16 October 1947 that Hitler had first taken poison and then shot himself through the mouth (PRO, WO208/4475, Fol.39). He repeated this in his interview with Musmanno on 7 January 1948 ((Michael A. Musmanno Collection, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, interview with Artur Axmann, 7 January 1948, FFl, Fols.28–32, 44), saying he had the information from Günsche, which the latter explicitly denied (Joachimsthaler, 236–7). Axmann’s claim contradicted, moreover, his earlier testimony from 1946 (see below). Neither of the surviving witnesses to the scene immediately following the deaths — Linge and Günsche — who saw the bodies in situ suggested that Hitler had poisoned himself; and there was no trace of the acrid smell of bitter almonds on his body (in distinction to that of Eva Braun). This negative evidence in itself also rules out the faint possibility that he both took poison and shot himself. The speed at which prussic acid acts would itself render it virtually impossible for Hitler to have crushed the ampoule of poison and then shot; and if the poison could have been swallowed a split-second after the shooting, the spasms incurred would have caused the blood to splatter on the shoulder and immediate surrounds, which did not happen. (On this, see Joachimsthaler, 269–70 and, including a few lines not to be found in the German original, the English version of his book, The Last Days of Hitler. The Legends, the Evidence, the Truth, London, 1996, 179–80.) The forensic evidence also eliminates the story, first put round by Artur Axmann, though based on hearsay evidence without substance, that Hitler shot himself in the mouth. Axmann had in his earliest testimony, in fact, explicitly ruled out a shot through the mouth and claimed (as Günsche had done) that Hitler had shot himself through the right temple (PRO, WO208/3790, Fol.125 (Axmann Interrogation, 14 January 1946)). Notions that Hitler was given a coup de grâce by Linge or Günsche — a further surmise of Bezymenski — are utterly baseless. The ‘theories’ of Hugh Thomas, Doppelgànger: The Truth about the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker, London, 1995 — that Hitler was strangled by Linge, and that the female body burned was not that of Eva Braun, who escaped from the bunker, belong in fairyland.