Having obtained incontrovertible evidence, I really believed that all the nonsensical rumours would be swept away and truth would prevail. I wrote a brief letter to my family, which they have preserved, to say that I had taken part in an important mission, that we would shortly be returning to Moscow, and I would see them soon.
I was sure we would be sent to Moscow with all the data and principal witnesses to the identification. I was sure that Käthe Heusermann, for her services to history, would be appreciated and rewarded. Nothing stirred. Everything stayed just as it was. Now what was going to happen?
Hitler – corpse or legend? We moved to Finow, a small town near Berlin, and then our Colonel Gorbushin was told specifically by Colonel Andrey Miroshnichenko,[1] that too much time was being spent on all this messing about with dead bodies and he should stop. Vasiliy Gorbushin departed for Flensburg, as a member of the Allied delegation to accept Dönitz’s surrender. He entrusted to Major Bystrov the task of ensuring the safety of our ‘trophies’. They were secretly moved to Finow and buried, still in their crates.
A few days later, on 18 May, a general appeared from General Headquarters, flanked by Lieutenant General Alexander Vadis,[2] Andrey Miroshnichenko and other bigwigs from front and our army headquarters, with, we were told, instructions from Stalin to check everything relating to Hitler’s death and return with a report. Miroshnichenko could have been in big trouble for failing to realize that Stalin’s reluctance to make Hitler’s death public, or indeed to let anyone else know about it, did not indicate that he was prepared to take the fact on trust, without having everything thoroughly verified by his personal representative. Stalin wanted to ‘own’ this secret all by himself.
There is a well known saying that in war a day lived is equivalent to three days in peacetime, but in those days of May 1945, even with the war over, the days were so busy and passed so rapidly they exceeded that score.
Something major was afoot. Käthe Heusermann and dental technician Fritz Echtmann had been arrested and brought in; SS bodyguard Harry Mengershausen, whom we had questioned, reappeared. A new investigation began. The whole identification and interrogation process restarted and was referred to as a ‘repetition’.
In these interrogations, Käthe Heusermann and Fritz Echtmann are referred to as ‘detainees’. This time, each interrogation was preceded by an official warning to me, as the interpreter, of my potential liability under Article such-and-such. At no time during the war, no matter what level I was translating for, had there been anything of that kind. This was new. In part, no doubt, it reflected the special burden of responsibility I bore in the interrogation, but it reflected no less the coming of a new, postwar era. During the war there had been more trust and less formality but, of course, a full seventeen days had elapsed since victory had been celebrated in Berlin.
The general studied everything, asked questions and listened attentively. He did not sign the records, but during breaks their text was forwarded verbatim to General Headquarters over the government’s special highsecurity communication lines. The records were signed by the assembled top brass and, in front of my eyes, I witnessed the brazen falsification of history. Anyone reading those documents would suppose Miroshnichenko was the leading figure in the investigation, the man who made history. It was straightforward fraud. Gorbushin is nowhere in the records. The historian commentators, bless them, are unaware that he had been sent off to Flensburg as a member of the Allied Commission.
At the end of the second day, this terribly senior investigation reached its climax. Picture the scene: a small town, the gentle light of evening, and a strange procession on its way to the city outskirts. There, in sparse woodland, during the curfew to ensure no snoopy spy among the local townsfolk should witness the deed, the crates containing the remains brought from Buch had been committed to the earth and a covert 24-hour guard deployed. Now Major Bystrov again walks ahead, showing the way. Behind him, the general, the Supreme Government Inspector, so to speak. Next, the military. Next, Hitler’s dentists Heusermann and Echtmann. Next the Führer’s bodyguard, Mengershausen, then some others.
Hardly speaking among ourselves, we walk slowly, oppressed by knowledge of what is imminent, our approaching confrontation of the mystery that always surrounds death. Finally we enter the woodland. The crates have already been exhumed.
Another report is compiled. All present, the Germans as well as the Soviet military (except for the general), sign. This report, compiled in the presence of his nuncio, is for Stalin himself.
The materials discovered by the investigation, the irrefutable proof of Hitler’s death, namely his jaw and his denture, are readied before my eyes to be sent to front headquarters and thence, presumably, to Moscow with the general, who departs shortly afterwards.
Judging by the documents, soon after the general left Finow, there was an influx to ‘the heights’ of top secret information ‘concerning the discovery of Hitler’s body’. The Council of Ministers Archive preserves a ‘Note via the top-security line’, sent by Lieutenant General Vadis to Beria and Abakumov on 23 May 1945,[1] detailing the circumstances of the discovery of the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun; the testimony of Kunz and Schneider, the former having heard about Hitler’s suicide from Goebbels, while the latter reported the request for petrol; the interrogations of Günsche and Linge confirming the fact of the suicide and burning of the bodies; and the identification of Hitler’s teeth by Fritz Echtmann and Käthe Heusermann. And the note from Beria to Comrade Stalin and to Comrade Molotov, passing on the information. Everyone was very busy, but what would Stalin do? Would he announce the discovery?
Next, Colonel Gorbushin was summoned to Moscow to report on Hitler to Stalin. Gorbushin had just returned from Flensburg. When he returned from Moscow, he told Bystrov and myself he had been ordered not to leave his hotel room and to await a call from Stalin, which never came. Instead, he was summoned by Abakumov, who said,
Comrade Stalin has familiarized himself with the entire course of events and the documents relating to the discovery of Hitler, and he has no questions. He considers the matter closed. At the same time, Comrade Stalin said, ‘But we shall not make this public. The capitalist encirclement continues.’
Vasiliy Gorbushin told me and Bystrov now to forget what he had said.
‘Hitler – Corpse or Legend?’ Such was the title of an article by Ronald Belford, circulated on 25 May 1945 by Reuters,[1] and that was precisely the question we confronted. ‘The examination of these human remains’, Reuters’ reporter wrote, ‘is the culmination of a strenuous week-long search in the ruins of Berlin.’ It was a culmination, however, that never happened. What happened instead was a cover-up.
A tyrant is always a mystery and that is his strength. Everything emanating from him is imbued with a secret significance hidden from the eyes of his subjects. Stalin’s pragmatic motivations are easier to work out, but not sufficient to explain why he would conceal such an important historical fact. The answer is largely hidden away in his inscrutable personality, in his ambiguous attitude towards Hitler, in the way he measured himself against certain analogous situations in which Hitler found himself, in the devastating sense of loss he may have experienced with the death of the hated, alluring enemy he had spent the days and nights of the war opposing, and in Stalin’s many psychological complexes. These depths I will not attempt to plumb.
2
Head of the Smersh counterintelligence directorate of the 1st Byelorussian Front. Birstein, pp. 306–7.
1
http://feldgrau.info/other/6484-statya-r-belforda-gitler-trup-ili-legenda. Accessed 23 December 2017.
1
R. Belford’s article: ‘Hitler – a Corpse or a Legend?’, in V. K. Vinogradov, J. F. Pogonyi and N. V. Teptzov,