Käthe Heusermann might have flown to Berchtesgaden, where Hitler was assembling his attendant staff with the intention of moving there himself. Dr Blaschke had, after all, urged her to fly out with him. She had refused, because for so long she had had no letters from her fiancé, the non-commissioned officer stationed in Norway, and was afraid he would be unable to find her if she left. She told me she had also buried her dresses at a resort near Berlin to keep them safe from the bombing and fires, and was reluctant to leave them. That, too, had caused her to stay.
That is how historically insignificant circumstances did history a big favour. Käthe stayed in Berlin and, as a result, did not vanish into oblivion, did not simply disappear. She was the only available person who knew and remembered all the distinctive features of Hitler’s teeth, and her contribution to identifying his remains was crucial. With Käthe Heusermann’s help we obtained irrefutable evidence that Hitler was dead and were able to pass it on to our descendants.
Käthe first described Hitler’s teeth from memory. It was now 10 o’clock in Berlin-Buch, the following morning, 10 May. She was being interviewed by Colonel Gorbushin and Major Bystrov, and I was translating and making notes. I asked her not to give the teeth their specialist names – incisor, canine and so on, for fear I might not correlate the German and Russian terms correctly. Instead she simply gave them numbers. The note I made is as follows:
Hitler’s upper denture was a gold bridge attached to the 1st left tooth with a window crown, to the root of the 2nd left tooth, to the root of the 1st right tooth and to the 3rd right tooth with a gold crown…
Käthe told us:
In autumn 1944 I took part in the extraction of Hitler’s sixth tooth on the left in the upper jaw. For that purpose I and Dr Blaschke travelled to his staff headquarters in the vicinity of Rastenburg [in East Prussia]. In order to remove the tooth, Dr Blaschke used a drill to saw through the gold bridge between the 4th and 5th teeth in the upper jaw to the left. At this time I was holding a mirror in Hitler’s mouth and attentively observing the whole procedure.
We could compare this with the report of the medical examination of 8 May, which read, ‘Bridge of upper denture on left behind premolar tooth (4) sawn vertically’. The report devotes a lot of space to a meticulous description of the other teeth. We had also X–rays that we found in Dr Blaschke’s little room under the Reich Chancellery.
Most importantly, we could compare her description with the contents of the jewellery box. Käthe Heusermann examined these and confirmed that they were indeed Hitler’s teeth.
She recalled this many years later for Die Welt. The article, like other materials from abroad, came into my hands quite by chance. Leon Nebenzahl, who translated my Notes of a Military Translator, showed me the magazine clipping on a visit to Moscow.
‘This took place in a house near Berlin,’ she writes, ‘in the presence of a colonel, a major and an interpreter. “Look closely,” the colonel instructed me, “and tell us what this is, if you know.”’
She describes examining the teeth taken out of the box and recognizing them. ‘I took the dental bridge in my hand. I looked for an unmistakeable sign. I found it immediately, took a deep breath and blurted out, “These are the teeth of Adolf Hitler.” I was showered with expressions of gratitude.’
Subsequently Heusermann talked to the specialists. Their report notes that, in conversation with the principal forensic expert of the front, Medical Service Lieutenant Colonel Shkaravsky, ‘which took place on 11 May 45’, Citizen Heusermann, Käthe ‘described in detail the condition of Hitler’s teeth. Her description coincides with the anatomical features of the oral cavity of the charred unknown male on which we conducted an autopsy.’ She also drew a diagram of Hitler’s teeth from memory, pointing out all their specific features.
After reading the first edition of my book, Faust Shkaravsky thanked me for mentioning him and corresponded with me for many years until his death. He sent me a photographic reproduction of that diagram, which he had kept, accompanying it with an explanation:
Heusermann and I had a disagreement concerning false teeth on steel posts. During the initial examination of the teeth I registered the presence of two posts, in the 2nd left and 2nd right upper incisors. Heusermann claimed there was a third.
At the end of our preliminary conversation, Käthe Heusermann was shown Hitler’s teeth and we conducted a joint inspection of them. Käthe Heusermann was right: a third post was found in the right lower canine. This disagreement, in which Heusermann proved correct, was further proof of how precisely she knew everything about Hitler’s teeth.
‘All this can be confirmed by Blaschke’s dental technician, Echtmann,’ Käthe told us at the first interrogation. Bystrov and I went to Echtmann’s apartment. In my diary I have a description of Echtmann’s worn-out, listless wife (who I thought must be suffering from a thyroid disorder). She clung desperately to her husband, who was also frail and sickly.
Fritz Echtmann, dental technician, was a short, dark-haired man with a pale complexion, aged thirty-something. He had worked at Dr Blaschke’s private laboratory on Kurfürstendamm since 1938, and made false teeth for Hitler. He, too, first gave a description of them from memory, and then had an opportunity to inspect them in Buch, where he, too, identified them.
This was a German starkly confronted with the death of Hitler, but Echtmann himself had been through too much, having lived with his wife and daughter in Berlin throughout the war, to be shocked by anything. He inspected Hitler’s teeth calmly. When, however, he looked at Eva Braun’s, he became agitated. On 11 May he said, and I wrote it down,
This way of constructing a dental bridge is my own invention. I did not make such a bridge for anyone else, and have never seen a similar way of attaching the teeth devised by anybody else. It was in the autumn of 1944. Braun rejected my first bridge because, when she opened her mouth, the gold was visible. I made a second bridge, eliminating that snag. I used a very original technique.
Many years later I saw a photograph of Fritz Echtmann in the December 1964 issue of the West German Stern. He had two fingers raised and had been photographed as he testified under oath to a court in Berchtesgaden that he really had identified Hitler’s teeth on 11 May 1945, and could thus certify that he was dead.
Back in 1945 we were, unfortunately, not aware of the testimony of two other very important witnesses of Hitler’s death: Otto Günsche and Hans Rattenhuber. They were both taken prisoner in sectors allocated to our neighbouring army, but there was no staff headquarters or any centre coordinating our separate activities. Later, their testimonies ended up in the same place in the archive as our documents, but it was almost twenty years before I was able to read them. How desperately we needed, from the very outset, people who had witnessed Hitler’s death, his cremation and burial.
Our investigation was already nearing its end when the Smersh agents of Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko detained a member of Hitler’s SS bodyguard, Harry Mengershausen. A handsome, broad-shouldered fellow, now wearing civilian clothes, Mengershausen said he could indicate the place where the bodies were hidden, covered with earth and rubble. He pointed out the crater, not knowing that the bodies had already been removed from it.
Klimenko had displayed a lack of conscientiousness, and even gloried in his negligent attitude towards the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. ‘Frankly,’ he wrote to me, ‘ I wasn’t that bothered, and in any case I had more urgent things to do than mess about with these corpses, especially since I’m squeamish, so I went out of my way to avoid them.’ That was the reason he sent Deryabin, instead of going personally, to retrieve the bodies from the crater. Now, however, he moved with commendable alacrity. Lieutenant Colonel Klimenko, with a group of officers and men, returned with Mengershausen to the Reich Chancellery and an official report was compiled: