Colonel Gorbushin decided in these difficult circumstances to obtain indisputable evidence. We were stationed in Buch, and whether in a modest house or a shed I found it difficult to say with any certainty until I later revisited the place. Sure enough, it was a small house. The remains of Goebbels, his wife and children were removed to its cellar.
Here, too, to Buch, on the orders of Colonel Gorbushin, were brought the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.
This was a street of small, modest detached houses with a great vault of sky overhead. Young children were pedalling around furiously on their bicycles; the adults walked by, engrossed in their worries and cares, unaware of, and showing no curiosity about, what was now located here.
I was confident that within another day or two the whole world would know we had found Hitler’s body. If I had known then that years later I would testify about all this in detail, I would probably have overcome my squeamishness and taken a closer look at those crudely constructed crates with their hideous, blackened remains – I had already seen them in the grounds of the Reich Chancellery – but I did not do so.
Here in Buch, when Hitler came to power, on his orders, people were subjected in the old, reputable clinics to ‘racial evaluation’ for the first time. In 1936 a card index of ‘hereditary biological health’ was introduced here, encompassing all residents of the large Berlin district of Pankow. A person’s fate, his career, the right to marry, the right to life itself, all depended on what was on his index card.
And as chance would have it, this was where Hitler himself was now brought to be subjected to forensic medical examination. On 3 May, following the discovery of the bodies of Goebbels and his family, a commission of army doctors appointed by order of Lieutenant General Telegin of the Military Council of the 1st Byelorussian Front, got to work in a brick building at the clinic in which Surgical Mobile Field Hospital No. 4961 was currently housed.
Now, without needing to inform Telegin, a couple more corpses were tossed the commission’s way, rather like cuckoos’ eggs. The commission included eminent forensic medicine specialists and pathologists: the chief pathologist of the Red Army, Lieutenant Colonel Kraevsky; Doctors Marants, Boguslavsky and Gulkevich. The man in charge was Medical Service Lieutenant Colonel Faust Shkaravsky, principal forensic medicine specialist of the 1st Byelorussian Front.
There was something portentous about Adolf Hitler being dissected under the watchful eye of Dr Faust. The autopsy was performed by a female doctor, Major Anna Marants, acting principal pathologist of the 1st Byelorussian Front, and it took place in Berlin-Buch on 8 May 1945.
Here is how Hitler appeared at the autopsy, as described in the official report:
The remains of the charred body of a male were delivered in a wooden crate 163 cm long, 55 cm wide and 53 cm high. A piece of knitted cloth measuring 25 × 8 cm, of a yellow colour, charred at the edges, resembling a knitted vest, was found on the body.
Given that the body has been burnt, it is difficult to judge the age, but it can be assumed that this was 50–60 years, the height is 165 cm (not an exact measurement owing to charring of tissue)… The body is significantly charred, exuding the odour of burnt flesh…
There are no visible signs of severe, lethal injuries or diseases on the body, which has been significantly affected by fire…
In the mouth, glass splinters were found which are parts of the walls and base of a thin-walled ampoule.
After a detailed examination, the commission concluded,
Cause of death was poisoning with cyanide compounds…
A test tube containing ampoule fragments found in the mouth of the corpse is attached to this certificate.
No other signs of harm that could result in death were established. Western researchers, journalists and memoirists frequently insist that Hitler shot himself: some from simple ignorance because of all the inaccurate information circulating about Hitler’s death, others from a desire to embellish the circumstances of his end. It was a German Army tradition that a commander, if he committed suicide, should use a pistol. It is instructive, however, that General Krebs, who ‘had the army in his bones’, preferred to take poison as the more reliable method.
To us the manner in which Hitler committed suicide was immaterial, and neither were we versed in the traditions of the German Army: they were of no interest to us. The fact remains that Dr Faust Shkaravsky and his competent colleagues carried out at that time a thorough medical examination and concluded that Hitler had taken poison.
Günsche, standing outside the door, did not hear a shot but did notice a strong smell of bitter almonds when the door was slightly open. Some people, Hitler’s secretary Gertraud Junge, for example, did hear a shot. She said, ‘When I left Hitler’s office and went up the stairs to the shelter landing, I heard two shots. I imagine the shots were fired in Hitler’s office.’
Be that as it may, people decided that Hitler shot himself. Thus, Hitler’s orderly, Bauer, who shortly after met the SS guard Mengershausen, told him that. Other close associates of the Führer said the same.
Was there really a shot in Hitler’s room, or did those awaiting the end outside the doors imagine it? And if there was, who fired it? The testimony of the head of Hitler’s bodyguard, Hans Rattenhuber, sheds light on this. He writes,
At about three or four in the afternoon, when I went into the anteroom I noticed a strong smell of bitter almonds. Högl, my deputy, told me with distress that the Führer had just committed suicide.
At that moment Linge came to me. He confirmed the news of Hitler’s death, adding that he had just had to carry out the most difficult order the Führer had given him in his life.
I looked at Linge in surprise. He explained to me that just before he died, Hitler ordered him to leave the room for ten minutes, then re-enter, wait another ten minutes, and carry out the order. At this, Linge quickly went into Hitler’s room and returned with a Walther pistol which he put on my desk in front of me. From its special exterior finish I recognized it as the Führer’s personal pistol. It was now clear to me what Hitler’s order had been.
Hitler, evidently uncertain that the poison would prove effective because of the many injections he had been having every day for a long time, ordered Linge to shoot him after he took it. Reichsjugendführer Axmann, who was present during this conversation, took Hitler’s pistol and said he would hide it until better times.
Rattenhuber evidently did not know another circumstance that prompted Hitler to give that order to Linge. The problem was that, when the poison was tested on a second dog, the poisoned puppy struggled against dying for a long time and was then shot. This was established at the autopsy of the dead dogs found in the crater, although at first it was overlooked and is not mentioned in the report detailing how they were found.
The conclusion reached by the doctors was,
The manner in which the dog was killed appears to have been as follows: it was first poisoned, possibly using a small dose of cyanide compounds and then, when it had been poisoned and was in its agony, it was shot.
This may have heightened Hitler’s fear, as he watched the poisoned dogs, that the poison might not work.
‘Linge shot Hitler,’ Rattenhuber wrote in his testimony.
I imagined that Linge’s hand might have been shaking when he shot at the dead Führer and the bullet missed him. So if a shot really did ring out in Hitler’s room, was it Linge who pulled the trigger? But there was no sign of a shot.