The search was completed in a very short period, three days of incredibly intense, dedicated effort. The electricity supply was cut, which meant there was no telling where anything was and, as if that were not enough, there was the labyrinthine geography of the shelter to cope with. Our task was to make sense of the documents found there: the official and personal papers of Hitler, Bormann and others.
We had plenty of luck, but complications, sometimes absurd, were never far away. Let me tell you about one of them. In the Reich Chancellery garden there was a dried up pond where ornamental fish used to swim but in which, during the battle for Berlin, the bodies were dumped of those killed in the bombing and shelling, or shot in the garden on Hitler’s orders.
On 3 May a group of generals from the 1st Byelorussian Front headquarters were passing through the Chancellery garden. One or other of them decided one of the bodies looked like Hitler. It was immediately pulled out of the pond and Germans were called to identify it. Their unanimous verdict was, ‘Not the Führer.’
It was resolved, however, to await the arrival of a former member of staff of the Soviet embassy in Berlin who had seen Hitler before the war several times and was due to fly in from Moscow. Accordingly, a gentleman with a little moustache and his hair falling to one side of his face and wearing a pair of darned socks duly reposed for a considerable time in the vestibule of the Reich Chancellery, then in the hall, until the diplomat finally arrived and confirmed: ‘Not Hitler.’ Newsreel and photojournalists had meanwhile been having a field day photographing and filming the body and, proudly labelling it ‘Hitler’, later depositing their handiwork in the archive and the historical film library. No member of the press was allowed anywhere near the actual remains and they were not photographed.
Unsurprisingly, the false Hitler was later blithely spliced into a Soviet documentary film but, under pressure from an agitated foreign press, he was disavowed and the film withdrawn. The posthumous adventures of this unknown man did not end there, however. He spawned a whole constellation of ‘doubles’ whereas, in reality, Hitler never had any. Neither was the screen life of the false Hitler over. Thirty years after the ill-fated film he was again resurrected from the archive by journalists and the photo was shown on television, masquerading as the body of Hitler.
The falsehood was immediately exposed, not wholly without my involvement. For a day I was receiving phone calls from newspapers and television stations of various countries asking what they should make of the incident. A French television company urgently interviewed me in time for the evening news. The makers of the television programme responsible for all this nonsense hit back, saying on television that they had been misled by the archivists. That is how it ended that time. No doubt there will be a next time.
From the very outset, the decision to classify the discovery of Hitler’s body laid the foundation for all manner of speculation that continues to this day. No attempt was made to combat it by the simple expedient of telling the truth.
Let us return to the Reich Chancellery while the search was in progress in May 1945, with that unidentified body reposing in the great hall. A unit of our army, 79th Corps, was leaving Berlin for a new deployment and a Smersh group who had already been involved in the search went with their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko, purely out of curiosity, to take a last look at the Chancellery garden and the place where Goebbels had been found. As Klimenko later wrote to me, that was near the emergency exit from Hitler’s bunker.
Now chance took a hand. Private Ivan Churakov’s attention was drawn to a bomb crater three metres or so to the left of that door. The soil in it was loose and seemed to have been thrown in recently. The soldier jumped down into the crater and, from the ground which had settled under his weight, something became visible. They dug down and found the black, charred bodies of a man and a woman. They pulled them out of the crater and took a good look at them. They did not recognize the man as Hitler, and indeed he was completely unrecognizable. The analogy with the charred body of Goebbels did not occur to them, and they did not look more closely at their find. The main thing that threw them off the scent was that Klimenko had heard Hitler’s body had already been found and was lying in the Reich Chancellery. That dead German in the darned socks hoodwinked them. The men filled in the crater again and left.
So the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were in fact discovered on 4 May, but it was not realized what they were. ‘I did not report finding these bodies to anyone,’ Ivan Klimenko wrote to me in one of his letters (of 9 February 1965), responding later to my questions. That could have turned out to be a fatal mistake, but fortunately the information percolated through the same day. We already had enough facts to understand whom the soldiers had dug up. Colonel Gorbushin insisted that those who had made the discovery be brought back.
In that same letter, Klimenko tells me that when he returned to his Smersh unit, he himself ‘began to wonder whether those bodies we had reburied were the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun’. This seemed all the more likely because, before leaving the Reich Chancellery, he had gone to look at the other ‘Hitler’ and learned he had been identified as ‘not the Führer’.
Klimenko sent the soldiers back to the Reich Chancellery under the command of his deputy, Captain Deryabin. The names of those who found the bodies are immortalized in a document drawn up the following day.
Berlin. Army on active service.
Declaration
This fifth day of the month of May 1945.
I, Senior Guards Lieutenant Alexey Alexandrovich Panasov, and Privates Ivan Dmitrievich Churakov, Yevgeny Stepanovich Oleynik and Ilia Yefremovich Seroukh in Berlin, in the area of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, near the place where the bodies of Goebbels and his wife were discovered, next to Hitler’s personal bomb shelter, found and recovered two bodies, one female, the other male.
The bodies are badly burned, and it is not possible to identify them without further information.
The bodies were situated in a bomb crater three metres from the entrance to Hitler’s shelter and covered with a layer of earth.
The ground in the crater was dug over and two dead dogs found, a sheepdog and a puppy.
A further declaration was drawn up:
We have found and recovered two slaughtered dogs.
Dogs’ characteristics:
1. German sheepdog (female) with dark grey fur, of large stature, having round its neck a collar in the form of a fine chain. No injuries or blood found on the body.
2. Of small stature (male), with black fur, without a collar, no injuries, bone of the upper half of the mouth punctured, blood in that area.
The bodies of the dogs were in a bomb crater 1.5 m apart under a light covering of earth.
There are grounds to believe that the killing of the dogs occurred 5–6 days ago, since there is no bad smell from the bodies and the fur is not becoming detached.
For the purpose of discovering items that might serve to confirm to whom these dogs belonged and the causes of their death, we carefully dug over and examined the soil at the place from where the bodies of the dogs were recovered. Here there were discovered:
1. Two dark-coloured glass tubes for medicine.
2. Sundry burnt sheets from typographically printed books and small scraps of paper with original handwriting.